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.
While they were both in London, Henry James
visited FK
weekly. She was a friend from the later 1840s with Frances Power Cobbe
, from whose partner, Mary Lloyd
, she rented a house at...
She had been inspired to discover more about medical research after publishing an anti-vivisection letter from Frances Power Cobbe
in her journal, The Lady's Own Paper.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
In preparation for her studies, AK
dabbled with...
Dedications
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
CADS
was the first poet to be published by Heinemann
. The book was dedicated to F. P. C.in reverent affection and admiration:
Scott, Catharine Amy Dawson. Idylls of Womanhood. Heinemann.
prelims
presumably this is the prominent feminist activist Frances Power Cobbe
death
Augusta Webster
Theodore Watts-Dunton
's tribute in the Athenæum recalled a noble band of women represented by George Eliot
, Mrs. Webster, and Miss Cobbe
, who, in virtue of lofty purpose, purity of soul, and deep...
death
Lydia Becker
She died at the Clinique Juillard before being seen by a doctor, and was buried in Geneva. Among the many who paid tribute to her were Arabella Shore
and Frances Power Cobbe
.
Blackburn, Helen. Women’s Suffrage. Source Book Press.