I, Vera
- Author Miranda Seymour
- Narrator Sofia Engstrand
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Publish Date 21 May 2026
- Run Time 8 hours and 57 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Biography: science, technology and medicine, History of medicine, Social and cultural history, True stories of heroism, endurance and survival.
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What to expect
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 Chekhovian account of her 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.
Critics Review
n PRAISE FOR I USED TO LIVE HERE ONCE:n
n‘This is a first-class life and a rollicking read. Seymour skilfully interweaves the autographical stories and novels with the people and fortunes in Rhys’s crazily adventurous life. She’s warmly sympathetic to the young ingénue of 17, and only slightly less so to the old bat of 87. She’s also the only Rhys biographer who travelled to Dominica to see what it was about the island — its colours, smells, conflicted history and voodoo sorcery — that haunted Rhys all her days but fired her imagination. The result is close to a masterpiece’
nn John Walsh, Sunday Timesn
n‘Her intimate and insightful biography … certainly reads like a novel. [Seymour] is a bewitching writer … gives us Rhys in all her glory’
nn Laura Freeman, The Timesn
n‘The superb achievement of Miranda Seymour’s painstaking and compassionate new biography is to dispel forever the idea that Rhys was simply a naïve chronicler of her own experiences … in terms of sheer technique, she was a virtuoso’
nn n Spectatorn n
n‘[A] slyly compelling new biography of Jean Rhys … The narrative has the tension of a thriller as Rhys struggles to finish Wide Sargasso Sea’
nn Rachel Cooke, Observern
n‘Seymour,a masterful biographer… tells her story with empathy, precision and a keen eye for the telling detail’LA Times, A Book of the Year 2022
n‘An exhaustive, definitive ride around both the idea and the reality of Jean Rhys … Seymour addresses a writer and woman who is at once self-absorbed and thoughtful, sardonic and sensitive’
nn Siobhán Kane, Irish Timesn
n‘An absolute belter of a biography … don’t read if you are afraid of monsters’ Marina Hyde, Favourite Reads of 2022
n‘A very impressive piece of work. A long and tangled life most authoritatively pieced together. I was completely absorbed’
nn Michael Frayn, author of Noises Offn
nMore from the same
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