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I, Vera

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What to expect

'An electric biography' DAILY TELEGRAPH

'Thrilling' MAIL ON SUNDAY

'A masterclass in the possibilities of biography' FINANCIAL TIMES

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 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

Critics Review

'I, Vera succeeds triumphantly on Seymour’s own terms, but it also offers a masterclass in the possibilities of biography: in the ways in which the genre can open up both past and present via the core sample of an individual life. Gedroits’s story reanimates the history of Russia’s political development and of the country’s relationship with its neighbours … She richly deserves the attentions of a storyteller of Seymour’s calibre, who restores her to prominence in the pages of I, Vera with warmth and compassion'
n n Financial Timesn n
'You wouldn’t want to mess with Vera Gedroits, a no-nonsense specimen of womanhood…Seymour, an accomplished storyteller, is a lovely, clear writer…it’s always bliss when Seymour gives us another glimpse of Gedroits, a charismatic and commanding presence in real life and on the page. At one point Seymour tells us that “vodka had always been Vera’s favourite tipple; now she started to up her intake of cigarettes, finding that papirosi roll-ups, while hugely addictive, added a hoarser rasp to her low and melodious voice… What a woman'
n n The Timesn n
'I, Vera is an electric biography, with Gedroits’s life as a junction box housing wires that lead to almost every live current of her era. As the narrative courses along, Seymour gives her reader micro-histories of the medical field, the war casualties Gedroits witnessed as an army doctor, the Bolshevik Revolution and Ukraine (Gedroits settled in Kyiv towards the end of her life)'
n n Daily Telegraphn n
'In this thrilling biography, Miranda Seymour tells the astounding story of Vera Gedroits, Russia’s first female professor of surgery and a Ukrainian heroine… Miranda Seymour has discovered a heroine for our own times'
n n Mail on Sundayn n
'How refreshing that Miranda Seymour should choose an absolute unknown to write about, whose life was genuinely interesting and surprising … she has uncovered a particularly entrancing story to beguile us with'
n n Spectatorn n
Author Miranda Seymour
Narrator Sofia Engstrand
Duration 12 hours and 6 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9780008650414
Format Audiobook
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Genre Biography: science, technology and medicine, History of medicine, Social and cultural history, True stories of heroism, endurance and survival
Availability AU, GB, IE

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