I, Vera: The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess
‘Vera Gedroits was a true medical heroine: outrageous, intrepid and devoted to saving lives. Miranda Seymour’s genius as a story teller brings this astonishing woman blazing back to life. I shall never forget her’ LADY ANTONIA FRASER
‘Miranda Seymour has written a wonderful and unputdownable book about an astonishing woman’ MEL GIEDROYC
Vera Gedroits was a towering, sweet-faced lesbian princess, an ardent supporter of workers’ rights who regularly performed true medical miracles of surgery. On one occasion, she even frogmarched an inquisitive Rasputin out of a ward for wounded officers.
While working for César Roux at the world’s best known medical institute in Lausanne, Vera became the world’s first woman surgeon. Off the back of this, she was appointed by the doomed Tsarina to teach the women of the Romanov family how to be nurses.
In 1919, Vera was sent to Kyiv, where her hospital reforms, innovative work and academic papers crowned an extraordinary career. During the troubled 1920s, in times of extreme danger, she completed a remarkable series of memoirs. The princess-surgeon’s prose, including a startling candid account of her early years as a revolutionary factory doctor, has been compared to that of Pasternak.
Some years later, Vera and her widowed lover Countess Maria Nirod were seized in the middle of the night and taken away at gunpoint during the Soviet purge of scientific intellectuals. Their whereabouts for the next few months were never disclosed. Vera’s pension was cancelled. The hospital and institute were closed. Living in extreme poverty, Vera died two years later of uterine cancer. She was just 61.
The princess’s name was removed from official Soviet medical records; her tremendous contribution to medicine and the radical improvements to wartime surgery she pioneered as the first female battlefield surgeon have remained unacknowledged to this day. Now, Miranda Seymour uncovers the riveting story of a daring and brilliant woman who chose to make Ukraine her homeland, someone adored by her friends and patients and whose achievements as an administrator and bold reformer invite comparisons to Florence Nightingale.
‘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 -
‘A flabbergasting story. Gripping, often startling and full of frankly incredible plot twists, Vera reads like a thriller, and one I could hardly bear to put down’ -
Hilary Spurling -
‘A wonderful and unputdownable book about an astonishing woman’ -
Mel Giedroyc -
‘The first full biography in any language of one of the most remarkable women of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, so well written and researched that it is unlikely to be superseded in the foreseeable future’ -
Donald Rayfield, -
Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian, -
Queen Mary University London -
‘Remarkable. A compulsive tour de force’ -
Colin Thubron -
‘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 -
‘As bright-eyed as a vixen and cheerful as a young bear, the scalpel-wielding, bear-hunting, lesbian, revolutionary yet imperial surgeon Vera is a force to behold. A one-off ever there was one’ -
Clare Mulley -
‘This biography is an absolute revelation. Miranda Seymour has rescued Vera Gedroits from a lingering obscurity that is hard to comprehend, given her dedicated and significant contribution to women’s medical history… brilliantly researched and illuminating… Gedroits shines through this fine narrative as a truly inspiring and unsung heroine’ -
Helen Rappaport -
‘Astonishing. Vera leaps off the page – a supremely skilled surgeon, writer, gender-fluid Russian princess, courageous witness to one of the most brutal upheavals of history’ -
Ruth Padel -
‘The history of an amazing woman set in the history of a continent at a time of great turmoil… It is a compelling read and beautifully written’ -
Averil Mansfield -