Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996) was a pioneer in public archaeology: first as the wife of a notable prehistorian, Christopher Hawkes, and then as the wife of the notable playwright, JB Priestley, placing her at the heart of British postwar culture. By the time of her death, Hawkes's own legacy appeared notably buried. When Christine Finn rescued her papers, she began what was to become a 25-year literary excavation of the many layers of Hawkes's personal and professional past - so much of it defined by the men in her life.

The title of her biography, Ice Without, Fire Within: A Life of Jacquetta Hawkes, is in fact inspired by what Priestley said upon meeting her: 'What a woman! Ice without and fire within'. This proved to be an astute observation of a complex woman who was, by turns, shy and distanced, yet passionate about the past, and in her personal life. With Priestley, Hawkes helped found CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and she campaigned for causes including countryside heritage and homosexual rights. Finn writes of a life lived beyond the discipline of traditional archaeology, and always with a nod to the past, Hawkes reaching her audiences not just through bestsellers, such as A Land, but through film, plays, journalism, in books for children, and an unexpected eroticism. She supported artists, and loved good clothes, and fine wine. Finn draws on her own background in both archaeology and journalism, to trace Hawkes' legacy as a dig through what survives in her childhood notebooks, academic tomes, poetry fragments, typed scripts and hand-written talks, publisher correspondence and fan mail. She treads Hawkes's landscapes from London to New Zealand, and sleeps inside her homes, revealing the effect of writing a biography-over-time on her own life. The long wait for her biography subject to be rediscovered by a new generation of archaeologists, and nature writers is vindicated in a growing interest in Jacquetta Hawkes. In 2012 A Land was reissued, with Robert Macfarlane, introducing it as 'one of the defining British non-fiction books of the postwar decade. Sixty years on it reads, fascinatingly, as a missing link in the literature of nature and landscape'. Heralding a new readership for Hawkes, Finn suggests this awakening is timely. Hawkes's deep motivation from the past was the future of an endangered planet.