Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer

Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer

Mitchell, Sally

Hardcover

Series: Victorian Literature & Culture (Hardcover)

Biographies GeneralHistorical FiguresWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 0813922712
ISBN13: 9780813922713
Publisher: Univ Of Virginia Pr
Published: May 29 2004
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.86
Height: 1.41 Width: 6.46 Depth: 9.48
Language: English

Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) is the most important nineteenth-century British writer and activist not heretofore treated in a full-length biography. An independent professional woman, she worked to improve conditions for delinquent girls and for the sick poor, promoted university degrees for women, roused support for the Union during the American Civil War, advocated for victims of marital violence, campaigned for women's suffrage, and engaged in a long-running battle with leading physicians decrying the use of animals in medical experiments. She was centrally located among the circle of London intellectuals who engaged the era's significant debates and was a respected religious and moral thinker as well. Bridging the gap between high and low journalism, she published in prestigious journals as well as in popular monthly magazines. At long last, Sally Mitchell gives this remarkable woman her due.

The only source of information about Cobbe's life has been her 1894 autobiography--and even that is considered by many scholars to be less than forthcoming. Over the past several years, Mitchell has unearthed extensive material by or related to Cobbe, dramatically increasing and updating the information now available about this major figure in social and literary history. She has transcribed hundreds of Cobbe's unpublished letters, drawn on archival papers and records for information about Cobbe's family and places where she lived and worked, and supplemented all the newly available material with instructive selections from Cobbe's anonymous journalism as well as other publications. Further, through the cooperation of Cobbe's heirs, Mitchell has been able to use significant materials that remain in private hands, including family letters and account books, a diary Cobbe's father kept during her first thirty-four years, a manuscript account of her 1858 journey to Egypt and Palestine, and a number of Cobbe's sketchbooks and photograph albums.

An accessible narrative biography, Frances Power Cobbe traces the details of Cobbe's life and work, analyzes her writing, and sets both in the context of the social and intellectual debates of her time.

Also in

Biographies General

View All