Victorian Lives

FRANCES ISABELLA DUBERLY

Mrs Duberly's War

Journals and Letters from the Crimea, 1854-6

edited with introduction and notes
by Christine Kelly

This journal is one of the most vivid eye-witness accounts we have of the Crimean War. When war with Russia broke out in 1854 Fanny Duberly, then aged 25, went to the Crimea with her husband, an officer in the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, and remained there until the end of the fighting. She survived the severe winter of 1854/55, witnessed the battle of Balaklava and the charge of the Light Brigade, and rode through the ruins of Sebastopol. No account of those two years fails to mention her. She was a spirited, courageous woman known by sight to British and French soldiers across the battlefields, regarded often with enthusiasm and sometimes with disapproval. Roger Fenton's photograph of her is one of the enduring images of the campaign.

She sent sections of her journal home as she wrote them. Her brother-in-law then saw the book through to publication, so that it was published, in 1855, while she was still in the Crimea. Not all the response was favourable: she had stepped into a man's world, and written about it in a way that seemed to some at the front an invasion of privacy and to others at home an abandonment of gentility.

The Journal was not reprinted after its second edition of 1856, and this edition will be the first since then. Christine Kelly provides an introduction, biographical and explanatory notes, an index, and makes revealing use of Fanny's original letters to her sister Selina, which often show a reckless, immediate response to events and people where the journal is more circumspect. The edition includes photographs, maps, and some of Fanny's own sketches.

Christine Kelly read History at Trinity College, Dublin, and now lives in Oxford. She is an authority on the Crimean War and has also published on sixteenth-century recusants.

Publication October 2004

Provisional price £25

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