By Frances Isabella Duberly

Mrs Duberly's magazine is without doubt one of the such a lot brilliant eye-witness bills now we have of the Crimean battle. Fanny Duberly, then elderly 25, observed her husband to the Crimea in 1854, and remained there until eventually the top of the combating, the one officer's spouse to stay during the whole crusade. She survived the serious wintry weather of 1854-55, witnessed the conflict of Balaklava and the cost of the sunshine Brigade, and rode throughout the ruins of Sebastopol. lively and brave, she was once identified through sight to British and French squaddies around the battlefields, looked frequently with enthusiasm and occasionally with disapproval. Witty and lovely, she loved flirtatious friendships with some of the most crucial males of the crusade. Her magazine stored in the course of the Russian conflict used to be released in 1855 and triggered a sensation. even supposing commonly praised because the "new heroine for the Crimea," Fanny was once additionally censured, ridiculed, or even parodied in Punch. She had stepped right into a man's international, and written approximately it in a manner that appeared to a few on the entrance an invasion of privateness and to others at domestic an abandonment of gentility. A best-seller on the time, the magazine was once no longer reprinted after its moment variation of 1856, and this is often the 1st version given that that point. Christine Kelly presents an creation, biographical and explanatory notes, and an index. She makes revealing use of Fanny's unique, formerly unpublished, letters to her sister Selina, which regularly exhibit a reckless, fast reaction to occasions and other people the place the magazine is extra circumspect. The variation comprises images, maps, and a few of Fanny's personal sketches.