You couldn't make it up; and you wouldn't actually need to
This emerges from a comment I made to someone else's post, mentioning Dr Lillias Hamilton (1858-1925).
While there has been a significant number over time of books (biographies, novels, also plays, TV programme, talk of a movie) about James Barry, Hamilton was another remarkable medical figure who transcended the supposed limitations on her gender to have an extraordinary career, yet no-one has yet written the rip-roaring novel based on any one of the extraordinary aspects of her life.
That may be because no-one would think the story plausible?
Anyway, Hamilton trained as a nurse (in a poor law infirmary) (and later wrote a novel on the subject) and then qualified as a doctor in the UK plus obtaining an MD from Brussels.
She then went out to India and set up a practice in Calcutta, and was also a medical officer at the Lady Dufferin Zenana Hospital. And then, for health reasons (and also from a spirit of adventure) she went to Afghanistan where she became the Amir's personal physician, had to employ a food-taster for fear of poisoning by his wives, introduced vaccination to the country -
It has also been posited by a scholar of my acquaintance that she must also have been engaged in The Great Game, though my own feeling about this is that it was probably more that the Government of India gave her a codebook and said 'If you do hear anything interesting...'
She eventually found it all a bit too exciting and returned to the UK, where she set up a settlement for homeless women in Liverpool, and then ran a nursing home in London. And then joined her brother in establishing a farm in the Transvaal. Also wrote and lectured about Afghanistan.
Then returned to the UK again and took the post of Warden at Studley College, which trained women for careers in agriculture and horticulture. One of her students there was Violet Firth, later and better known as the occultist Dion Fortune, who claimed that Hamilton had deployed upon her sinister Oriental methods of mind control that she had learnt in the Mysterious East.
In 1915 she went to Montenegro with the Wounded Allies Relief Committee.
She was an active member of the Women's Freedom League.
There have been expressions of interest in writing a biography but unfortunately the material available is quite scanty.
But I do wonder why no-one has taken any of these episodes and turned them into fiction - e.g. quite apart from the alleged occultism at Studley, why not a Moonstone-style something from her days in the Great Game coming back?
We ask: is this all too much for fiction? This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2234675.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.