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.
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...
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/.
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...
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...
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...
Textual Features
Florence Marryat
In a melodramatic plot, the heroine, Rose Gordon, who has actually trained as a doctor but works as a nurse, marries a surgeon, Mr Lesquard. She does not discover until after the wedding that he...
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
Friends, Associates
Anna Kingsford
AK
's wide-ranging interests brought her into contact with an array of people known to a greater or lesser extent in the intellectual life of the day. Through the women's movement she met Barbara Bodichon
Friends, Associates
Anna Kingsford
AK
appears to have had a somewhat complicated relationship with Frances Power Cobbe
. Their association seems to have begun around 1872, when Kingsford moved to London and became an active member of the English...
Material Conditions of Writing
Anna Kingsford
As a young married woman, AK
became active in the women's movement with the likes of Frances Power Cobbe
, Barbara Bodichon
, and Elizabeth Wolstenholme
; this soon led to her first distinctly political publication.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Education
Anna Kingsford
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Fanny Kemble
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...
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...