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.
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...
Literary responses
Pandita Ramabai
The High-Caste Hindu Woman is Ramabai's best-known work in western society. By the time of her return to India in the fall of 1888 she had sold around ten thousand copies. It was recognized by...
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
The poems take up various late-Victorian feminist issues, and their topicality and title seem to make them an implicit rebuttal of Tennyson
's nostalgic Idylls of the King. In A Woman's Ethics (perhaps an...
Friends, Associates
Felicia Skene
From her youth FS
was accustomed to mixing with distinguished people. Sir Walter Scott
, a friend of both of her parents, found her youthful company a relief when he was old and ill. In...
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...
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...
Textual Production
Mary Somerville
In her eighty-ninth year MS
composed a lively autobiography which was heavily edited for publication by her daughter Martha
. Her friend and fellow author Frances Power Cobbe
also helped with the editing process.
Patterson, Elizabeth Chambers. Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science, 1815-1840. Martinus Nijhoff.
194
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...
Frances Power Cobbe
later recalled the occasion in 1873 when AS
(who was expected at a meeting of women to say literally a few words, befitting her position as a figurehead for the movement) found...
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...
In the wake of Robert Elsmere's success, MAW
sought to prove the feasibility of the New Brotherhood which she had described in her novel through the foundation of a similar philanthropic organisation. As she...