Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Frances Power Cobbe
-
Standard Name: Cobbe, Frances Power
Birth Name: Frances Power Cobbe
Nickname: Fan
Nickname: Fanny
Pseudonym: C.
Pseudonym: F.
Pseudonym: F. P. C.
Pseudonym: Only a Woman
Pseudonym: Merlin Nostradamus
Used Form: Miss Cobbe
As one of the most prominent Victorian writers of non-fiction prose, and the only feminist of the period who wrote regularly in periodicals, FPC
published prolifically in a range of genres from reportage and travel writing to social criticism, theology, and ethics. As a professional journalist she wrote more than a hundred periodical essays, and above a thousand anonymous newspaper leaders. She published, at a conservative estimate, eighteen books and innumerable tracts. A key figure in the Victorian women's movement, she produced ground-breakingly trenchant as well as frequently witty analyses of women's social and political disabilities, representing womanly duty as feminist praxis. All her social writings are grounded in her life-long effort to promulgate a nondenominational theistic system of ethics. In her later career she dedicated herself to fighting animal vivisection (a cause she characterized as an abolitionist crusade analogous to anti-slavery) and the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. For the anti-vivisection campaign alone she produced considerable journalism and at least two hundred tracts. Her theology, ethics, feminism, and anti-vivisection converged in her argument that sympathy—beyond as well as within the human community—was an index of true civilisation.
Hamilton, Susan. “Locating Victorian Feminism: Frances Power Cobbe, Feminist Writing, and the Periodical Press”. Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, No. 2, pp. 48-66.
48
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press.
Rigg, Patricia. Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
154, 173-4
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press.
271
Residence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Frances Power Cobbe
, who years later travelled from Venice to Florence to meet the author of Aurora Leigh, noted that Casa Guidi became a place of pilgrimage during [EBB
's] life, and...
Reception
Mary Somerville
Personal Recollections deals at length with the people MS
knew, rather than with her intellectual development or her scientific work. Large portions about the representation of science, in fact, were removed at the suggestion of...
Reception
Vernon Lee
This book lost Lee the friendship of others who had admired her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. Broken friendships included those with Oscar Wilde
(refigured as the character Posthlethwaite), Jane
and William Morris
Reception
Eunice Guthrie Murray
EGM
was made an MBE in 1945. Her journals are privately owned by her collateral descendants. A scrapbook now in the Women's Library
in London contains EGM
's collection of suffrage newspaper cuttings; since an...
politics
Mary Somerville
MS
met Frances Power Cobbe
in Florence where both women campaigned to stop a physiology professor from practising vivisection. MS
declared Cobbe to be the cleverest and most agreeable woman I ever met with, and...
politics
Anna Kingsford
AK
's active campaign against vivisection and in support of vegetarianism began as early as 1872, when she published a letter by Frances Power Cobbe
in The Lady's Own Paper.
Pert, Alan. Red Cactus: The Life of Anna Kingsford. Books and Writers.
40
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
By 1878, while...
politics
Jessie Boucherett
An active suffragist, JB
helped (with a committee whose members included Harriet Martineau
, Frances Power Cobbe
and Mary Somerville
) to organize the suffrage petition presented to Parliament on 7 June.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
RB
demonstrated his own progressive commitment to higher education for women by signing Emily Davies
's 1867 Memorial Respecting the Need of a Place of Higher Education for Girls. He also publicly supported anti-vivisection...
politics
Felicia Skene
FS
also supported the anti-vivisection campaign of Frances Power Cobbe
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
politics
Mary Somerville
At the request of John Stuart Mill
, MS
was the first to sign his new parliamentary petition for women's suffrage .
She had had misgivings about supporting such a cause when it seemed to...
Occupation
Isabella Beeton
Henceforth, at the age of twenty-four, IB
took on what was in effect an equal partnership with her husband in the planning and editing of the magazine, and began to work outside her home in...
Occupation
Anna Swanwick
The occasion was a plan by some leaders of the women's suffrage movement to use AS
's great scholarly reputation as a public-relations tool to demonstrate the abilities of women. She was expected to second...
Timeline
21 April 1868: A Married Women's Property Bill prepared...
27 May 1878: The Matrimonial Causes Act was amended so...
National or international item
27 May 1878
The Matrimonial Causes Act was amended so that magistrates could order a marital separation and the payment of an allowance to abused wives in cases of spousal assault.
4 June 1878: Lady Margaret Hall, a women's college at...
17 November 1881: Professor David Ferrier was unsuccessfuly...
Building item
17 November 1881
Professor David Ferrier
was unsuccessfuly tried for unlicensed vivisection under the recent Cruelty to Animals Act.
1882: The Wife Beaters Act decreed the offence...
National or international item
1882
The Wife Beaters Act decreed the offence of wife-beating to be punishable by public flogging, as well as exhibition in a pillory.
By 27 September 1884: Theodore Stanton published The Woman Question...
Writing climate item
By 27 September 1884
Theodore Stanton
published The Woman Question in Europe: A Series of Original Essays.
1886: The working-class, popular, evangelical writer...
Women writers item
1886
The working-class, popular, evangelical writer Marianne Farningham
(born Mary Ann Hearne or Hearn
) published as Eva Hope a book called Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era which reveals unexpected feminist sympathies.
July 1889: Women's Suffrage: A Reply appeared in the...
Building item
July 1889
Women's Suffrage: A Reply appeared in the Fortnightly Review to counter Mary Augusta Ward
's Appeal Against Female Suffrage in the previous month's Nineteenth Century.
1890: The Victoria Street Society established the...