Felicia Skene

Born in May 1821 in France, and she lived in many places throughout her life, including Edinburgh, Greece, Leamington, and then Oxford. She did charity work in St Thomas’ parish and worked as a nurse during the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in Oxford. In her nursing career she was sent to Crimea, where she became friends with Florence Nightingale. Perhaps most significantly, she did a lot of work ‘rescuing’ both prostitutes and tramps in Oxford.

She was one of the first female visitors to the prison. She pleaded for prisons to focus more on reform as she believed that they needed to change and invest in individual counselling. Further to this, every day she would go to the prison and meet inmates at 6am to provide breakfast and other assistance they may have needed.

Throughout her life she published several articles, memoirs, and books, the most well known of which was ‘Hidden Depths’ published anonymously in 1866. She was considered a local saint by the people of Oxford and was known to be very humble. She is a key figure in the disruption of Human Rights history by advocating for women's rights and prison reform. Felicia died at 34 St Michael’s Street, Oxford on 6th October 1899, where there is now a blue plaque.