Felicia Skene
Felicia Mary Frances Skene (* May 23, 1821 in Aix -en- Provence, † October 6, 1899 in Oxford) was a Scottish author, philanthropist and Gefängnisreformerin of the Victorian age. She published under the pen name Erskine Moir.
Life
Felicia Skene was the daughter of a Scottish lawyer and grew up in Scotland, France and Greece. The family that was close to the so-called Oxford Movement within the Church of England, to let finally settled in Oxford. Skene was increasingly charity work within their church community. During the severe cholera and smallpox epidemic in 1854, she was involved in collaboration with the physician Henry Acland to join together with volunteer nurses to care for sufferers. When Florence Nightingale was commissioned in response to the dramatic reports Times correspondent William Howard Russell and Thomas Chenery about the lack of care of sick and injured British soldiers in the Crimean War by Sidney Herbert to lead a group of nurses, some of these volunteer nurses could be recruited. Felicia Skene also helped in the difficulty in recruiting suitable nurses; A nursing education did not exist at this time. The nurses who worked in the first half of the 19th century in British hospitals, it was usually to former servants or widows who found no other employment and were forced to earn their bread by this work.
In 1869, she moved into a house in St Michael Street Oxford and began her charity work in the women's prison in Oxford. It belongs alongside Elizabeth Fry to the Victorian reformers of the prison system, in particular campaigned for a consultation of the prisoners and their care after discharge and campaigned for a more liberal use of the prisoners. She herself made the usually early in the morning dismissed ex- convicts at the prison and offered them breakfast and jump start in their new life. In her novels, she often resorted to current social issues of their time. Among her most successful novels Hidden Depths heard.
Publications (selection)
- The Isles of Greece and Other Poems (1843 )
- The Lester's (1847 )
- Wayfaring Sketches ( 1847)
- The Inheritance of Evil: Or, the Consequence of Marrying a Deceased Wife 's Sister (1849 )
- The Tutor 's Ward ( 1851) - in two volumes
- The Divine Master ( 1852)
- Penitentiaries and Reformatories (1865 )
- The Shadow of the Holy Week (1883 )
- Scenes from a Silent World: Or Prisons and Their Inmates (1889 )
- A Test of the Truth (1897 )