Power and Protest: Francis Power Cobbe and Victorian Society

Dubbed the 'great sunbeam' by her contemporary Louisa May Alcott, Frances Power Cobbe, the social reformer, feminist and anti-vivisectionist, was a lifelong rights campaigner: for women, for the poor and for animals. Brought up a gentlewoman in nineteenth-century Dublin in an age in which convention ruled, Cobbe's reforming spirit started in her rejection of a life of domesticity and accepted femininity. She earned her living as a prolific writer of books and articles for newspapers and per...