Florence Dixie

A highly unusual personality, Lady Florence Dixie was also a highly unusual late-Victorian writer. She was a precocious poet: the verses she claimed to have written in childhood awoke an extraordinary chorus of praise. She was the first female war correspondent ever assigned by a newspaper to report from a combat zone, and she went on to pursue political campaigns through speeches, monographs, and journalism. She published a number of passionately committed ideological and sometimes utopian novels and dramas supporting the causes she believed in, particularly equal status for women and the overthrow of organised religion. Much of her fiction, like her travel-writing, is autobiographical.