A Black British Nurse in the Crimea--and Twenty-First Century Outrage

Mary Grant Seacole, a "Pioneer Nurse" (1805-1881, married 10 November 1836)

On 30 June of this year (2016), after a twelve-year campaign, a statue of Mary Seacole was unveiled at St. Thomas's Hospital, London--though not without a great deal of controversy.

Sculptor Mark Jennings' statue
 of Mary Seacole
(photograph by Owen Blacker)

The story of Seacole and her role as a nurse in the Crimea has been largely overshadowed by that of her much more famous contemporary, Florence Nightingale--and, in fact, much of the opposition to recognition of Seacole has come from various Nightingale supporters and organizations, notably the Florence Nightingale Society. 

It's hard to see why these two women and their contributions have been pitted against one another--except, of course, the belief that there couldn't possibly be two accomplished, notable women working in the same profession at the same time in the the same place. 

The conflict seems to reflect a deeply tinged misogyny--obviously recognizing and appreciating one woman would take away recognition and appreciation of the other. The dispute has devolved to ridiculous levels--including objections to Seacole's sculpture being taller than one of Nightingale near Buckingham palace and outcries over the fact that Seacole's statue has been placed on the ground of a nursing hospital founded by Nightingale. (There is surely more than a little racism involved as well in all of this. One detractor scoffed at Seacole, who in 2004 was named the "greatest Black Briton" by a public vote, saying she was "three-quarters white.")

And, I'll add, as a side note, this conflict seems to be related to the persistent praise of a gifted woman as the "tenth Muse"--something I've railed about on numerous occasions in this blog. Obviously there can only exist one exceptional woman at any one time, imagined as an addition to the panoply of nine classical muses--who could possibly regard an accomplished woman as, simply, you know, normal? (For all my musings--okay, ranting--about all the tenth muses I've noted since beginning this blog, click the label, below.) 

I will let you google for yourself if you're interested in learning more about this "controversy" over Mary Seacole--Patrick Vernon's "Rubbishing Mary Seacole" (The Guardian, 21 June 2016), is a good introduction to the whole sorry mess.    

Instead, I'll focus here on Seacole's full and varied life. Born in Kingston, Jamaica on an unknown date in 1805, Mary Jane Grant was the daughter of James Grant, a Scottish lieutenant in the British army, her mother a free, mixed-race Jamaican woman who combined nursing skill and running a boarding house, Blundell Hall. About her mother, Seacole would later write:

My mother kept a boardinghouse in Kingston, and was, like very many of the Creole women, an admirable doctress; in high repute with the officers of both services, and their wives, who were from time to time stationed at Kingston. It was very natural that I should inherit her tastes; and so I had from early youth a yearning for medical knowledge and practice which has never deserted me. . . . [From her,] the ambition to become a doctress early took firm root in my mind; and I was very young when I began to make use of the little knowledge I had acquired from watching my mother. . . .*

Seacole was proud of her heritage--she is proud of the "good Scotch blood coursing through her veins," and she is proud of her brown skin. She later wrote about the difficulties she faced when trying to book passage on an American ship as she was trying to travel back to Jamaica from Panama:

my experience of travel had not failed to teach me that Americans (even from the Northern States) are always uncomfortable in the company of coloured people, and very often show this feeling in stronger ways than by sour looks and rude words. I think, if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic—and I do confess to a little—it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related— and I am proud of the relationship—to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors— let others affect to doubt them if they will—is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me?

As a child, young Mary Grant received an education from a woman she referred to as her "kind patroness" and more practical training from her mother, whom she assisted in the running of the boarding house and with her healing practice. In 1821, she traveled to England visit relatives. After a year she went back to Jamaica, then returned to England, taking with her West Indian spices, preserves, and pickles for trade, this time staying until 1825. In her autobiography, she provides few details about her trips to London--nothing about where she stayed or how she supported herself--though she does note that her companion, a woman whose color was darker than her own, was taunted by Londoners with "rude wit." 

She returned to Jamaica again, this time nursing her elderly patron and working with her mother, at times caring for invalid soldiers and their wives. (She mentions working at the British Army hospital in her memoir.) On 10 November 1836 (the occasion for today's post), she married Edwin Horatio Seacole, an English merchant (said also to be the godson of the great British naval hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson--according to family traditions, Seacole was Nelson's illegitimate son).

Albert Charles Challen's
1869 portrait of Mary Seacole
(National Portrait Gallery)

Within a few years, Mary Grant, now Mary Seacole, suffered a number of personal tragedies: in two short years, 1843 and 1844, Blundell Hall burned down, her husband died, and her mother died.  She allowed herself a short period of grief, then set about rebuilding her mother's business. She made a success not only of the business but of her nursing skills, notably in the cholera epidemic in Jamaica in 1850.

In 1851 she joined her brother in Panama--arriving in time to experience a cholera epidemic that swept through the city of Crucis--her nursing experience, in particular treating cholera, helped. She assisted the rich, who paid for their treatment, and the poor, whom she treated for free. While in Panama, she also opened and ran a hotel. After returning to Jamaica in 1853, she again encountered disease; this time, authorities asked her to help in treating victims of yellow fever. She treated some in her boarding house, others at the British Army camp. 

In 1854 she was on the move again, returning briefly to Panama. In her autobiography she writes of having been compared to the Greek hero (and wanderer) Odysseus, a comparison she does not appreciate--"Some people, indeed, have called me quite a female Ulysses," she writes, adding, "I believe that they intended it as a compliment; but from my experience of the Greeks, I do not consider it a very flattering one." In Panama, she read of the escalation of the war in Crimea and decided to volunteer her services as a nurse.

Seacole left Panama for England, and although she brought with her "ample testimony" of her experiences, the War Office denied her application to be sent to the Crimea. An appeal to the Crimea Fund, a publicly sponsored organization that raised money to support the wounded, was also rejected. 

Seacole decided to fund herself, though she eventually found a partner, a Caribbean businessman named Thomas Day. Seacole's plan was to open the British Hotel, which she described as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers." (It is this description, I suppose, that leads some of her detractors to claim all she did was serve tea and lemonade while she was in the Crimea.) 

She left England in January of 1855--on her long trip, she writes of encountering men she had formerly treated, who greeted her with cries of "Mother Seacole, Mother Seacole!" During a stop in Malta, she receives a letter of introduction to Florence Nightingale to add to the many letters of reference she had received from British officers stationed in Jamaica.

In Constantinople, she was eventually to meet with Nightingale. She describes their meeting in her autobiography: 

[A nurse says to her,] "Miss Nightingale has the entire management of our hospital staff, but I do not think that any vacancy--"

"Excuse me, ma'am," I interrupt her with, "but I am bound for the front in a few days;" and my questioner leaves me, more surprised than ever. The room I waited in was used as a kitchen. Upon the stoves were cans of soup, broth, and arrow-root, while nurses passed in and out with noiseless tread and subdued manner. I thought many of them had that strange expression of the eyes which those who have gazed long on scenes of woe or horror seldom lose.

In half an hour's time I am admitted to Miss Nightingale's presence. A slight figure, in the nurses' dress; with a pale, gentle, and withal firm face, resting lightly in the palm of one white hand, while the other supports the elbow--a position which gives to her countenance a keen inquiring expression, which is rather marked. Standing thus in repose, and yet keenly observant--the greatest sign of impatience at any time, a slight, perhaps unwitting motion of the firmly planted right foot--was Florence Nightingale--that Englishwoman whose name shall never die, but sound like music on the lips of British men until the hour of doom.

She has read Dr. F—'s letter, which lies on the table by her side, and asks, in her gentle but eminently practical and business-like way, "What do you want, Mrs. Seacole--anything that we can do for you? If it lies in my power, I shall be very happy."

With this "blessing," Seacole traveled on to Balaclava, where she built her British Hotel from scrap materials she could scrounge. The hotel opened in March 1855. Seacole provided meals, comfort, support, and care. As a correspondent of The Times reported in September of that year, "Mrs. Seacole . . . doctors and cures all manner of men with extraordinary success. She is always in attendance near the battle-field to aid the wounded, and has earned many a poor fellow’s blessings."

In her memoir of the Crimea, Lady Alicia Blackwood wrote that Mary Seacole "personally spared no pains and no exertion to visit the field of woe, and minister with her own hands such things as could comfort or alleviate the suffering of those around her; freely giving to such as could not pay."

Seacole was the first British woman to enter the city of Sebastopol after it fell on 9 September, taking with her provisions and visiting the city's hospital, where thousands were dead and dying. (A light-skinned girl named Sarah eventually joined Seacole--many, including Nightingale, alleged she was Seacole's illegitimate daughter, but there is no evidence to support such an assertion.) 

Seacole continued her work in Crimea until the war's end; she returned to England, she would later write, "poorer than I left it." She was declared bankrupt in 1856. But when her plight was made known in the British press, a fund was established, raising enough money to discharge her bankruptcy. The fund was supported by the many soldiers and officers she had treated and tended. 

The cover of Seacole's
1857 autobiography

Undaunted, she hoped to travel to India in 1857 after the Indian Rebellion, but fundraising on her behalf was not successful. In the end, she returned to Jamaica after publishing her Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, the first autobiography published by a Black woman in England. 

In Jamaica, Seacole once again experienced financial difficulties. Hearing of her straitened circumstances, London supporters and patrons, including the prince of Wales, the duke of Edinburgh, the duke of Cambridge, and many senior military officers, raised funds for her. 

Although she would return to England in 1870, seemingly to offer her services as a nurse during the Franco-Prussian War, she did not make her way to the front again. She remained in London, dying there on 14 May 1881. 

You can read Seacole's autobiography by clicking here. It is just too bad that if you Google Seacole's name, you'll have to wade through all the crap. Too bad her detractors seem to think that recognizing Seacole somehow damages Nightingale (who herself would attempt to undermine Seacole by insinuating her British Hotel was really nothing but a brothel). 

Too bad more people don't remember the assessment of Sir Howard Russell, the Times war correspondent: "I trust that England will not forget one who nursed the sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some of her illustrious dead." His words are now engraved on the sculpture of Seacole.

Why would anyone want to trash a woman like that?

*Update, 15 January 2024: William Dalyrumple and Anita Anand, hosts of The Empire podcast, recently had an episode featuring Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. Titled “Tale of Two Nurses,” it is available at all podcast platforms, but I’ll link to a YouTube broadcast here.

The guest on this episode of the podcast, Helen Rappaport, author of In Search of Mary Seacole: The Making of a Black Cultural Icon and Humanitarian (2022), identifies the unique role of the "doctoress" in Jamaica. A doctoress was a local African woman who treated sick African slaves in slave "hothouses" (hospitals), often incorporating herbal medicines, "pharmaceutical skills almost," into a "rich and sophisticated range of treatments." 

Florence Nightingale: The Lady with the Lamp--Who's "Shrieking Aloud in Her Agony"

Florence Nightingale (departs for the Crimea, 21 October 1854)

There is perhaps no more unlikely spokeswoman for the horrors of nineteenth-century views of “true” womanhood than Florence Nightingale.* I say “unlikely” because I am assuming that many, if not most, readers are like me and still associate Nightingale with the carefully sanitized biographies they read when they were children. 

Florence Nightingale, c. 1860

Although I’ve been madly consuming newly published women’s biographies and histories during the last twenty years or so, Florence Nightingale remained “the lady with the lamp,” a saintly figure, the sheltered and pampered daughter of a wealthy English family who sacrificed marriage and motherhood in order to devote herself to ameliorating the sufferings of others. 

I am embarrassed to admit that, aside from dim memories of childhood books, the only clear image I had of Florence Nightingale came from the 1936 film The White Angel, starring the dark-haired Hollywood beauty, Kay Francis. It wasn’t until a very few years ago that I stumbled on the “real” Florence Nightingale and her angry, agonized essay, “Cassandra.” 

I should have known better, of course—the hint that there was something more to be known about Nightingale’s life was right there, all along, in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers,” Woolf writes, “there were many that wept their eyes out. Florence Nightingale shrieked aloud in her agony.” Woolf adds a footnote here—“See Cassandra. . . .” But I had read past Wolf’s signpost, completely overlooking it. 

Once I heeded Woolf’s command (her use of the imperative, “See”!) and read “Cassandra,” I was forced to reassess my childish views of the saintly “the lady with the lamp.” 

Nightingale’s angry “Cassandra” was written before she was able to realize her goal of dedicating her life to meaningful work—it was written, in fact, when she was in the midst of the blackest despair. Born in 1820, the young Nightingale seemed to conform to the expectations of her family and her class, but when she was not yet seventeen, she experienced a kind of religious vision. 

She later described this moment of awakening: “On February 7th, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to His service.” By the time she entered her twenties, still not sure what service God might have called her to, she rejected what she called the “useless trifles” of women’s lives. “What is my business in this world and what have I done this fortnight? I have read the ‘Daughter at Home’ to Father and two chapters of Mackintosh; a volume of Sybil to Mamma. Learnt seven tunes by heart. Written various letters. Ridden with papa. Paid eight visits. Done company. And that is all,” she wrote. 

She feared the emptiness of this kind of life—“I see . . . so many of my kind who have gone mad for want of something to do.” Expected to marry, Nightingale found no relief for her despair in the “conversation of all these good clever men” that should, she was told, “be enough” for her. “Why am I starving, desperate, diseased on it?” she wondered. 

She ultimately rejected marriage—to be married, she wrote, “would seem to me like suicide.” Equally objectionable was the kind of philanthropic do-gooding, visiting the poor and the sick, that was appropriate for women of her class. In 1845, she announced to her family that she had decided to become a nurse, but she had to overcome years of opposition before she could devote herself fully to her calling. Florence Nightingale was finally able to leave home in 1853, after her father settled the sum of five hundred pounds a year on her. (The parallel with Woolf here--a woman needs five hundred pounds a year and a room of her own--is uncanny.)

“Cassandra” was written between 1850 and 1851, just before those years of opposition ended. Although the first-person narrator of “Cassandra” is never identified with Nightingale herself, it is hard not to read the essay as a reflection of Nightingale’s own life—that is exactly what Woolf does, for example. 

The title of the essay alludes to the Greek Cassandra, to whom the god Apollo gave the gift of prophecy—but with the curse that no one would believe her prophecies. Although there is no reference at all to Cassandra in the body of the essay, the impassioned writer still seems to see herself as a prophet who is ignored. Is she also, like her Greek namesake, cursed? Is she doomed to know what should be done but to be forever unable to do it? 

Following her suggestive title, Nightingale begins her essay with an epigraph adapted from the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, an opening that certainly seems to emphasize the view that the writer sees herself as a prophet. The gospel opens with a reference to John the Baptist, introduced by a quotation from Isaiah: “I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” In Nightingale’s variation of the gospel verse, the “wilderness” of Isaiah becomes the “crowd” of nineteenth-century society: “‘The voice of one crying in the’ crowd.” 

But make no mistake—although she may occupy a space in nineteenth-century society, the narrator of the piece regards herself as isolated and deprived. She is “wandering alone in the bitterness of life without.” She writes that “such an one” might be tempted simply to sleep away her suffering like so many who “are not yet awake.” But “one alone,” like Nightingale, one who is both awake and “prematurely alive” to her suffering, “must wander out in silence and solitude.” She is fully alive and, like Cassandra, fully aware of the “evil” that others refuse to see, “and yet [she] has no power to discover the remedy for it.” 

Nightingale confronts her readers with a bitter question: “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity—these three—and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?” In the first section of her deeply religious yet deeply despairing essay, Nightingale addresses fathers and mothers who consign their daughters to “the monotonous events of domestic life.” Denied any outlet for their passions, the daughters of these fathers and mothers “must act the farce of hypocrisy, the lie that they are without passion,” and find themselves trying, in vain, “to subdue the perpetual day-dreaming, which is so dangerous!” 

Nightingale believes that the dangerous fantasies filling young women’s minds are produced by the complete lack of any meaningful “interest” in their lives. And yet, even as she writes out of her suffering, this desperate voice crying out in the wilderness does not reject her suffering—in fact, as Nightingale observes, a life of suffering is far better than a life without it, for “out of nothing comes nothing. But out of suffering may come the cure.” 

Interestingly, middle-class women like Nightingale do have rooms of their own. In “Cassandra,” Nightingale focuses her attention on the “drawing rooms” of Victorian homes where women live out much of their daily lives. The drawing room is a feminized space, although men do join women there at times during the day, after dinner, for example. But men’s lives and work are carried on outside this domestic space, whereas women must spend their lives at home, confined to such rooms. 

In the second section of “Cassandra,” Nightingale shows how arid a desert the drawing room is. She accomplishes this by putting an imaginary man into the reality of this woman’s world: “If one calls upon a friend in London and sees her son in the drawing-room, it strikes one as odd to find a young man sitting idling in his mother’s drawing-room in the morning.” She carries her imagined scene further—“But suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting round a table in the drawing-room, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books, how we should laugh!” 

But why, why, she asks, would this be so funny: “Now, why is it more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in the carriage? Why should we laugh if we were to see a parcel of men sitting round a drawing-room table in the morning, and think it all right if they were women?” 

The answer, Nightingale suggests, is that women are “never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted.” It is their “duty,” in fact, to be always ready, prepared to give up anything, at any moment, for “every trifler” who is “more selfish than themselves.” Women may be wasting their time on nonsense and trivialities in the drawing room, but that is only because they are always at someone else’s disposal—apt at any moment to be called away from whatever they are doing. 

“Women never have half an hour in all their lives . . . that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting some one,” she writes, and “[s]o women play through life.” Their time “is of no value”; instead they “are taught from their infancy upwards that it is wrong, ill-tempered, and a misunderstanding of ‘a woman’s mission’ (with a great M.) if they do not allow themselves willingly to be interrupted at all hours.”

And so, to fill those numberless hours while they are waiting to be interrupted, women occupy themselves by “sitting in the drawing-room, saying words which may as well not be said.” They write letters to their friends. They busy themselves with needlework projects of varying kinds. They may play music or draw, but not seriously—such occupations are “only used by her as an amusement (a pass-time, as it is called).” 

The only escape from this stultifying routine, aside from the daydreaming that worries Nightingale, is marriage, but she rejects this as a plausible occupation for women. “Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered to women for escape from this death; and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced!” But women will find nothing in marriage but sacrifice—indeed, a “woman must annihilate herself” in marriage, Nightingale concludes. A wife must dedicate herself completely “to the vocation of her husband; she fills up and performs the subordinate parts in it.”

A man “gains everything by marriage”—a woman, nothing. “The intercourse of man and woman—how frivolous, how unworthy it is!” she writes. “Can we call that the true vocation of woman—her high career? Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage—that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being—probably does not exist at present upon earth.” 

In her despair, Nightingale encourages women to wake up. As she nears the end of her essay, she addresses them directly, sounding not unlike Christine de Pizan addressing all womankind--present and future--at the end of The Book of the City of Ladies. “Awake, ye women, all ye that sleep, awake!” Nightingale writes, imploring women to think of accomplishing more than “nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.” 

In rejecting marriage and traditional “family values,” Nightingale knows that she is challenging the fundamental institutions of her society. In the end, knowing that her analysis of these institutions might be rejected or attributed to a “womanish” tendency to “complain,” she takes a radical move, co-opting her critics by recalling the example of Jesus: “Was Christ called a complainer against the world?” she asks.

Nightingale builds to her radical conclusion by teasing out the implications of her question: “People talk about imitating Christ, and imitate Him in the little trifling formal things, such as washing the feet, saying [H]is prayer, and so on; but if any one attempts the real imitation of Him, there are no bounds to the outcry with which the presumption of that person is condemned.” 

In rejecting notions of “true womanhood” that limit women to their constricted lives inside the family and their subservience to family interests, Nightingale reminds her readers of Jesus’s own rejection of his birth family—his mother, his brothers—and his substitution of a “true” family: “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother and sister and mother” (Nightingale is paraphrasing Mark 3:33 and 3:35). But Nightingale knows how dangerous redefining “family” is for a woman: “But if we were to say that, we should be accused of ‘destroying the family tie,’ of diminishing the obligation of the home duties,” she observes. 

The final section of “Cassandra” shows us a dying woman, speaking to those who will mourn her and who will lament the “good” that she “might have done.” The dying woman knows that, in fact, her “talent” and her “gifts” will be missed—the world will “be put back some little time” by her death. But those losses have already occurred. Her physical death, in fact, is less than her real death, “which has taken place some years ago,” when she had “to sacrifice” her own individual gifts, which might have changed the world, to “conventionality.” 

The picture Nightingale paints of this dying woman is bleak: “My people were like children playing on the shore of the eighteenth century. I was their hobby-horse, their plaything; and they drove me to and fro, dear souls! Never weary of the play themselves, till I, who had grown to woman’s estate and to the ideas of the nineteenth century, lay down exhausted, my mind closed to hope, my heart to strength.” The bitter truth is that the dying woman is freed only by her death; “Welcome, beautiful death!” she cries. 

Several years after her return from the Crimea, in 1860, Florence Nightingale suffered a physical collapse. Like so many women, she was prescribed complete bed rest. As Monica Baly and H. C. G. Matthew write in their Oxford Dictionary of National Biography essay on Nightingale, her collapse may have been the result of a recurrence of the debilitating Crimean fever she had suffered in 1856, although it may also have been a cardiac problem of some sort. Others have suggested a calculated psychosomatic component to Nightingale’s illness, that it was perhaps “psychoneurosis with a purpose,” a “protective” mechanism by means of which Nightingale could avoid her family and devote herself to her work. 

The specific causes of Nightingale’s illness weren’t critical to its treatment, however, because whatever the source, the prescription for the peculiarly female diagnosis of hysteria was the same. As Baly and Matthew note, the “accepted medical wisdom was that excessive mental exertion on the part of a woman was unnatural and would lead to breakdown: the standard treatment was complete rest and quiet. Florence Nightingale took to her bed or couch because the doctors ordered it. . . .” 

But, while she spent the next twenty years as an “invalid,” seeming to accept her role as patient, Nightingale didn’t entirely follow doctor’s orders. She refused to give up her work. She knew that, without work, a woman’s isolation and inactivity would destroy her. And so, for the twenty years she spent in her “sickroom,” Nightingale carried on with her work, reporting on sanitation in India, involving herself with the training of midwives, recommending improvements in hospital design, and supporting reform in English workhouses. 

After the death of her mother in 1880—in other words, after some twenty years—Florence Nightingale rose from her bed, left her sick room, and re-entered the world. She certainly wasn’t as vigorous as she had been, nor was she actively involved in government service. Although she may have been “increasingly out of touch” with developments in public health care, she lived another thirty years . . . 

Conventionally dated to 1852, Florence Nightingale’s “Cassandra” was privately published in 1860, in the second volume of her Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth. It was not widely available until 1928, when it appeared as an appendix to Ray Strachey’s The Cause: The History of the British Women’s Movement. Nightingale’s essay is available in Myra Stark’s Cassandra, an Essay by Florence Nightingale. The text is also available in Mary Poovey's Cassandra and Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale.

The 1936 film starring Kay Francis as Florence Nightingale, The White Angel, is not currently available on video or DVD, but you can occasionally catch it on Turner Classic Movies. I still enjoy it whenever it's broadcast.

There are many excellent biographies of Nightingale, but you might start with the materials available online at the website of the Florence Nightingale Museum.

Most of all, though, follow Woolf's command: "See Cassandra!"

*This post has been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own.

Elizabeth Fry, the "Angel of Prisons"

Elizabeth Gurney Fry (died 12 October 1845)

Elizabeth Gurney was born on 21 May 1780, the daughter of parents who were both members of prominent banking families--her father, John Gurney, was a partner in Gurney's Bank (headquartered in Norwich), her mother, Catherine Bell, was related to the Barclay family, founders of Barclay's. (Gurney's merged into Barclay's Bank in 1896.) 

Elizabeth Gurney Fry, c. 1823

The Gurneys were socially aware Quakers, and when Elizabeth Gurney was a young girl, she accompanied her mother on relief visits to the poor and sick. 

Later, she became friendly with the Norwich writer and activist Amelia Alderson (Opie), and in the Alderson home was introduced to the thinking of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. After she heard the preaching of a visiting American Quaker, William Savery, Elizabeth Gurney expanded her interests, helping in a number of local charities, including efforts to teach poor children to read.

Married to Joseph Fry in 1800 (he also belonged to a prominent banking family), Elizabeth Gurney Fry moved to London, became a Quaker minister, and bore eleven children.

In London she met Stephen Grellet (originally Étienne de Grellet du Mabillier), a French Catholic who had converted to Quakerism and become involved in missionary work throughout America and Europe. In addition, Grellet was especially interested in prison conditions. In 1812, at the prompting of Grellet, who had been shocked after a visit to Newgate, Fry herself visited the prison.

Although circumstances in her own life were difficult--including births of two more children and the death of her four-year-old daughter--Fry dedicated herself to prison reform. By 1816, she was making regular visits to the prison, working to ameliorate the conditions of the prisoners, attempting to raise funds for educating the prisoners, and, ultimately, helping to establish the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate, a committee that organized a school for the children of female inmates, hired a matron to oversee the incarcerated women, and developed programs for the women to produce goods for sale in order to buy provisions that would improve their living conditions.

Newgate Prison
(the prison was closed in 1902 and demolished in 1904)

In 1818, Elizabeth Fry became the first woman to give evidence for a House of Commons committee when she testified before a committee investigating London prisons. A year later, in 1819, she published Prisons in Scotland and the North of England, and in 1825, Observations of the Siting, Superintendence and Government of Female Prisoners.

From Prisons in Scotland and
the North of England

In addition to her work with prison reform, Fry was concerned about the homeless--after seeing a child who had died on the streets of London, she established "night shelters" in London. She helped to set up "visiting societies," volunteers who would seek out the poor and ill in their homes in order to offer aid, and she established a nursing school, said to have inspired Florence Nightingale. 

And Fry was widely criticized, too--for having neglected her duties as a wife and mother.

Fry died at the age of sixty-five, on 12 October 1845.

There are biographies of Elizabeth Fry, including one recently published, but it's hard to find one that isn't hagiographic or simplistic. I recommend June Rose's Elizabeth Fry--it's out of print, but you can easily find used copies. 

Update, 3 October 2020: The Forum, a program of the BBC's World Service, has just produced an episode on Elizabeth Fry--click here, to listen.