Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (review)

Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) was an extraordinary example of the complexity of Victorian activism, feminism, and humanism. She was a journalist who wrote on behalf of delinquent girls, homeless dogs, domestic abuse victims, and suffragists, while condemning the medical experimentation of Victorian "science" and restrictive interpretations of organized religion in her age. She lived an unconventional existence as an intellectual, an outspoken agitator for change, and an unmarried professional woman who shared a home and life with another woman. Still, until this biography by Sally Mitchell, relatively little scholarly attention has been given to Cobbe. Her own 1894 autobiography was the standard work historians consulted, but little attention was given to her unpublished letters, published journalistic efforts, and archival materials; that is, until now. Sally Mitchell's work is both comprehensive and creative in bringing the voice of France Power Cobbe to the contemporary world. Writing in a narrative style, Mitchell attempts to recreate the formative years of Cobbe's childhood and the development of early relationships that would shape her adult views. By her twenties, her own family's turmoil and her mother's ever-failing health turned Fan to disbelief.

Indeed, Mitchell lays the foundation for Cobbe's steadfast defense of the powerless and rejected as a response to her early indignation at familial relationships. A chapter devoted to Fan's twenties and thirties describes a woman in spiritual turmoil and in rebellion. Her correspondence with Thomas Parker, a Boston social reformer and preacher, filled her spiritual void with hope, but at the same time, opened social doors to her among many who would shape and share her future spiritual, social, and political beliefs. She still remained at home, running the household and caring for her father, but refused to comply with his narrow beliefs, spiritual or social. While she cared for her father, Fan's own radical views became clarified as she rejected much of what her family had taught her to believe was essential to a proper existence.

Fundamental to the development of the activist Francis Cobbe was the eleven-month trip through Europe and the Middle East that followed her father's death in 1857, and the new freedom it afforded to develop her own relationships. It was through her travels as a single woman and the companions she acquired that Cobbe met Mary Carpenter. Cobbe left her home in Newbridge to join Carpenter in Bristol at the Red Lodge School, where she met the aging Mary Somerville. Somerville's work in the sciences and social sciences introduced Cobbe to new avenues of education and a new intellectual community. When Cobbe began to write about her travels and her ideas concerning religion and the disciplines she was learning, the result was the birth of a journalism career, a move to London, and the beginnings of a new life among the intelligentsia and reformers while still in her forties. There, another relationship became critical for her personal and professional development – that of Mary Lloyd.

The bulk of the book discusses Cobbe's many activities and accomplishments in reform movements and intellectual circles, as well as her long-standing relationship with artist and feminist Mary Lloyd, with whom Cobbe lived for thirty-three years, "a friendship as nearly perfect as any earthly love may be" (351). Cobbe's unconventional views about women, relationships of authority and deference, religious and secular morality, all seemed to take shape. Her work in the Spectator and the Echo drew attention to those unable to protect themselves: working-class women, children, victims of domestic violence, and stray animals. She concentrated her writing and reform efforts on behalf of the unrepresented, as her friendships and political partnerships with Henry and Millicent Fawcett, Elizabeth Garrett, and Fanny Kemble, among others, attest, putting her at the heart of the women's suffrage campaign, the abolitionist movement, and radical reform generally.

This is a fine biography that gives much information and insight into Frances Power Cobbe...