Wed, 27 May 2026, 18:30 at Hatchards, Piccadilly. Buy your ticket here!
The Biographers’ Club is delighted to recommend – to members and non-members alike – what promises to be a scintillating talk from one of Britain’s leading biographers.
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.
Can’t wait till 27 May? Here’s a clip of Seymour teasing the book to us back in March:
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