Rosemary T. Van Arsdel, Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist and Educator.

Fulton, Richard D.

Rosemary T. Van Arsdel, Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist and Educator (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), xvi + 249 pp., $74.95 cloth.

Florence Fenwick Miller knew everyone who counted in the various Victorianera women's movements. When she was 16, she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine with Sophia Jex-Blake and her coterie. Her closest friend from the age of 19 on was Lucie Cobb, second cousin of Francis Power Cobb. Other friends included Louisa Amelia Ann Sims (Mrs. George), Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, Emily Faithfull, and Susan B. Anthony. She was acquainted with most of the leaders of the various wings of the Suffrage movements because, from the time she was 19, she traveled around the country as a platform speaker for women's rights. At various times she fought with Helen Blackburn and Lydia Becker over tactics in the movement, and was attacked by Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Harriet M'Ilquaham in private circles over personal issues. In addition, she was the personal physician of the popular novelist Isabella Varley Banks. She wrote a regular column for one of the most powerful newspapers of the late nineteenth century, The Illustrated London News. She published articles in Belgravia and the Modern Review, Lett's Illustrated Household Magazine and the Lady's Pictorial, The Women's Penny Paper and every influential daily and weekly newspaper in London and the provinces. She wrote textbooks (mainly on health or physiology), how-to books, short stories, an admittedly bad novel, and a biography of Harriet Martineau. She edited a variety of periodicals, including Outward Bound, a magazine for emigrants; she edited and published the Woman's Signal, a woman's rights newspaper affiliated with the Temperance Union. She made her living, and later supported her husband and family, as a doctor, platform speaker, and writer.

Her work on behalf of woman's suffrage and woman's rights in general spanned arguably the most critical time in the movements, from about 1871 to her effective retirement in 1918 (her last article appeared in the Fortnightly in November 1924). In her own career she was something of a trail blazer: in the 1870s, only a handful of women were doctors or platform speakers, and in 1876, only four were members of the London School Board. Thus, Miller attracted a significant number of influential women to her personal circle (her close friend Susan B. Anthony appointed her to the organizing board for what became the International Women's Suffrage Committee, and Miller later became Treasurer of the organization). Almost everything she accomplished she did without the support of her mother, an acerbic, strong-willed, rather conservative woman who apparently had nothing good to say about her daughter's scandalous behavior. It didn't help that Miller lived with her parents during these early years as an activist. She finally escaped to the relative safety of suburbia after marrying Fred Ford in April of 1877. Even then her mother continued to berate her for, among other things, her unlady-like activities that included retaining her maiden name after her marriage (something that was literally not done in the 1870s).

Despite her high profile during her lifetime, and despite the fact that she regularly appeared in memoirs as a key participant in various nineteenth-century women's organizations, little has been written about Florence Fenwick Miller. Rosemary Van Arsdel has done a commendable job of ransacking known (and some previously unknown) sources to craft this biography. Except for a typescript autobiography of Miller's first 25 years that now resides in the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, not many documents by or about her are left. Her will tantalizingly refers to a bequest to her daughter Irene of "all her books, papers, manuscripts, copyrights, and 'bound up volumes containing my thirty-three years' work on the Illustrated London News' and the 'bound up volumes of the Woman's Signal and Outward Bound' and all of her printed articles contained in several scrapbooks" (225). This treasure trove of materials has, alas, disappeared, forcing Professor Van Arsdel to use newspaper articles and contemporary letters and memoirs to reconstruct Miller's life. As a result, we get to see the public Miller--dates and subjects of her speeches, dates of travel, campaigning dates--and the journalistic evaluation of the effect of her speeches on her audiences, but we don't get to see the speeches themselves. We never really get to "hear" Miller as her audiences heard her. Without being able to read the speeches at least, we don't know why her audiences found her so compelling. Nor do we get to see samples of her writing to help us to understand why her readers, especially those who were so influential in the British and American suffrage movements, found her so persuasive. And we don't get to see much of the private Florence Fenwick Miller: the mother of two young women (given her relationship with her own mother, how did she get along with her daughters?), the happily married public figure whose husband mysteriously disappeared sometime in the early '90s (according to family legend, Fred ran off with a music hall actress).

What we do get, however, is the fruit of Professor Van Arsdel's years of searching for material by, on, or about Florence Fenwick Miller. What we do get is a sketch of one of the most influential figures in the late Victorian suffrage movement, and a peek inside some of the politics of the movement: the fear of some leaders that Miller's radical beliefs would create an attractive target for the anti-suffrage crowd; the fear of the equal-rights women that suffragists would inject partisan politics into their meetings. And we get both Professor Van Arsdel's delightful sense of humor and her exacting scholarship, which packs much interesting supplementary information into her footnotes. For example, after describing an interview that Miller published in the Woman's Signal describing Mrs. Frank Leslie's business acumen, Van Arsdel notes drily: "What the interview did not say was that in October 1891, Mrs. Leslie had made a foolish mistake in marrying Oscar Wilde's ne'er-do-well brother, Willie, who was many years her junior. He caused her much pain and grief during their short union through his idleness and fondness for drink. The marriage ended early in 1892" (212). And later, after discussing "An Address to the Queen," a document "signed by scores of women prominent in the women's movement" (205), Van Arsdel footnotes: "The women who signed this 'Address' were labeled in the press as the 'forward women'. Thus we have the 'redundant women', the 'platform women', and the 'new women', supplying four fresh categories in which women were seen as playing new roles in society" (212).

Florence Fenwick Miller is a part of Ashgate Press' Series on the Nineteenth Century, which is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it benefits from being a part of a series under the able editorship of Vincent Newey and Joanne Shattock. On the other, it is rather expensive, and seems to be aimed more at research libraries than at the individual scholar. That's a pity, because it is not only a valuable research tool, but an interesting read as well.

Richard D. Fulton

Whatcom Community College