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.
Frances Power Cobbe
thought this book capital and reported herself delighted by the sense, and the fun! Your quick bits of sarcasm are impayable [sic].
Caine, Barbara. Victorian Feminists. Oxford University Press.
76
Matthew Arnold
pronounced it very pleasantly written, as well...
Textual Production
Caroline Frances Cornwallis
This book came out of CFC
's long held sentiment that the current treatment of children needed to be corrected.
Cornwallis, Caroline Frances. Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis. Editor Power, M. C., Trübner and Co.
202, 204-5
The Ragged School Union
had been founded in 1844 to promote education for...
It had appeared serially in Belgravia, as well as in a number of newspapers. Collins dedicated Heart and Science to Napoleon Sarnoy
, a photographer well-known for his pornographic postcards. The novel was partly...
Textual Features
Wilkie Collins
Heart and Science concerns the struggle between an orphaned heiress, Carmina, and the 'scientific' aunt and guardian who want her fortune. Carmina becomes a human subject of vivisectionist Dr Benjulia, who to further his own...
Friends, Associates
Mary Carpenter
This house was bought for her by Lady Byron
, who also arranged for Carpenter's close friend and fellow activist Frances Power Cobbe
to move into Red Lodge with her in November that year. Cobbe...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Carpenter
This book exerted important influence on other reformers including Frances Power Cobbe
.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1246 (13 September 1851): 972-3
Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. University of Virginia Press.
82
Textual Features
Josephine Butler
Here JB
argues that women's limited employment, particularly as governesses and seamstresses, is an undeniable reality, and that as a consequence of this reality, both education and training are required to free women from economic...
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...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Aurora Leigh was welcomed with enthusiasm by many female writers and feminists: it became a touchstone of Victorian feminist poetry for its unrivalled ambition and the scope of its achievement. One moving testimony to its...
politics
Robert Browning
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
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.
Friends, Associates
Jessie Boucherett
Partly through her membership of the Kensington Society
(a social and political discussion group of about fifty women inaugurated in 1865), JB
broadened her acquaintance with significant members of the feminist movement, including Frances Power Cobbe
IB
was fond of society life, had a wide circle of friends, and was noted for her hospitality. Her home at the Villa Brichieri, with its terraced garden overlooking Florence and the Arno, was...