I, Vera

The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess

De: Miranda Seymour

Narrado por: Sofia Engstrand

'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

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 Chekhovian account of her 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.

©2026 Miranda Seymour

Reseñas de la Crítica

'This is a thrilling masterpiece of biographical reconstruction. Miranda Seymour has discovered a magnetic character, whose enthralling, bold, but until now little known life moves at the speed of a comet'

Alexander Masters

In this remarkable biography Miranda Seymour brings to life a prodigious but half-forgotten figure, and her place in twentieth-century Russian history. A compulsive tour de force.

Colin Thubron, author of Among the Russians

'Vera Gedroits was one of the most extraordinary members of the extraordinary generation which made the Russian Revolution. She became a surgeon and had the adamantine self-belief a surgeon needs, plus enough energy to power a small star. Miranda Seymour has told an amazing story.'

Jane Stevenson, author of The Light of Italy

'This is a flabbergasting story. Vera Gedroits started a career of radical innovation as a young factory doctor at the turn of the nineteenth century in Russia’s provincial backwoods, going on to become one of the world’s first female surgeons, a pioneering expert in battlefield repairs and a medical reformer far ahead of her time in Kiev after WW1. […] Seymour’s biography is a first attempt to do her justice in the UK. Gripping, often startling and full of frankly incredible plot twists, I, Vera reads like a thriller, and one I could hardly bear to put down.'

Hilary Spurling, author of Ivy When Young

'The first full biography in any language of one of the most remarkable women of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, the first female professor of surgery in her country and an extraordinarily original character, this biography, full, authoritative and seminal, is so well written and researched that it is unlikely to be superseded in the foreseeable future.'

Donald Rayfield, Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian, Queen Mary University London

'This biography is an absolute revelation […] Gedroits shines through this fine narrative as a truly inspiring and unsung heroine'

Helen Rappaport, author of Four Sisters