I, Vera: A Radical Princess - Miranda Seymour at Hatchards, Piccadilly

We are delighted to invite you to an evening with Miranda Seymour discussing her new book

I, Vera: The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess

Born in 1870, Vera was the rebel daughter of a Lithuanian prince and a Russo-German mother. Trained, with her father’s encouragement, as a schoolgirl medic and eventually a surgeon, Vera pioneered radical new techniques while working as a battlefield surgeon in 1904 and hijacking a train to save the wounded.

Following her years as a militant factory doctor, always on the side of the workers, Vera Gedroits was summoned to work for the Romanovs. She made friends with some of Russia’s greatest poets and writers while teaching nursing techniques to the doomed Tsarina and her daughters up until the Revolution. Vera never dropped her title or fled for safety. Instead, working in Kyiv through the dangerous 1920s, she became the city’s most respected surgeon while completing an extraordinary series of memoirs that have earned comparisons to Pasternak.

A victim of Stalin’s plans to destroy Ukraine’s intelligentsia, Vera and her lover, Countess Maria Nirod were arrested at midnight and imprisoned. Later, following her appointment as the world’s first woman Professor of surgery, Vera was dismissed without warning or reason from Kyiv’s prestigious Medical Institute. Her memoirs were completed in conditions of extreme poverty. She died of uterine cancer aged 61 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

The Princess-Surgeon’s name was banished from further publication and from official medical records. Her tremendous contribution to medicine and her pioneering work as a wartime surgeon have remained unacknowledged to this day. In I, Vera, Miranda Seymour recovers the lost story of a brilliant, politically outspoken woman whose achievements, including radically improving wartime surgery as the first official female battlefield surgeon, can almost be said to rival those of Florence Nightingale.

Miranda will be in conversation with historian Helen Rappaport, whose most recent book The Rebel Romanov explores the whirlwind life of Julie of Saxe-Coburg, The Empress Russia never had.

We hope you will be able to join us for what promises to be a fascinating and illuminating evening!

Tickets

General admission £10

Hatchards Reward Card-holders £5

‘Vera Gedroits was a true medical heroine: outrageous, intrepid and devoted to saving lives. Miranda Seymour’s genius as a storyteller brings this astonishing woman blazing back to life. I shall never forget her.’

Antonia Fraser

‘In this remarkable biography Miranda Seymour brings to life a prodigious but half-forgotten figure, and her place in twentieth-century Russian history. A compulsive tour de force.’

Colin Thubron

'This is a thrilling masterpiece of biographical reconstruction. Miranda Seymour has discovered a magnetic character, whose enthralling, bold, but until now little-known life moves at the speed of a comet'

Alexander Masters

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Host or Publisher Waterstones