Published in 2022
365 pages
Helen Rappaport is a historian specialising in the Victorian period, with a particular interest in Queen Victoria and the Jamaican healer and caregiver, Mary Seacole. She also has written extensively on late Imperial Russia, the 1917 Revolution and the Romanov family. Her love of all things Victorian springs from her childhood growing up near the River Medway where Charles Dickens lived and worked. Her passion for Russian came from a Russian Special Studies BA degree course at Leeds University. In 2017 she was awarded an honorary D.Litt by Leeds for her services to history. She is also a member of the Royal Historical Society, the Genealogical Society, the Society of Authors and the Victorian Society. She lives in the West Country, and has an enduring love of the English countryside and the Jurassic Coast, but her ancestral roots are in the Orkneys and Shetlands from where she is descended on her father’s side. She likes to think she has Viking blood.
What is this book about?
“An astonishingly rich story… wonderfully informative” The Times
“Rappaport does a terrific job of bringing respectful rigour to her account of Seacole’s extraordinary life” Daily Mail
In Search of Mary Seacole is a superb and revealing biography that explores her remarkable achievements and unique status as an icon of the 19th century, but also corrects some of the myths that have grown around her life and career.
Having been raised in Jamaica and worked in Panama, Mary Seacole came to England in the 1850s and volunteered to help out during the Crimean War. When her services were turned down, she financed her own expedition to Balaclava, where she earned her reputation as a nurse and for her compassion. Popularly known as ‘Mother Seacole’, she was the most famous Black celebrity of her generation – an extraordinary achievement in Victorian Britain. She regularly mixed with illustrious royal and military patrons and they, along with grateful war veterans, helped her recover financially when she faced bankruptcy. However, after her death in 1881, she was largely forgotten for many years.
More recently, her profile has been revived and her reputation lionised, with a statue of her standing outside St Thomas’s Hospital in London and her portrait – rediscovered by the author – is now on display in the National Portrait Gallery. In Search of Mary Seacole is the fruit of almost twenty years of research by Helen Rappaport into her story.
The book reveals the truth about Seacole’s personal life and her ‘rivalry’ with Florence Nightingale, along with much more besides. Often the reality proves to be even more remarkable and dramatic than the legend.
