Florence Farr

Florence Beatrice Emery Farr was a British West End leading actress, composer and director. She was also a womens rights activist, journalist, educator, singer, novelist, leader of the occult order, The Golden Dawn, and one time mistress of playwright George Bernard Shaw. She was a friend and collaborator of Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats, poet Ezra Pound, playwright Oscar Wilde, artists Aubrey Beardsley and Pamela Colman Smith, Masonic scholar Arthur Edward Waite, theatrical producer Annie Horniman, and many other literati of Londons Fin de sicle era, and even by their standards she was the bohemians bohemian. Though not as well known as some of her contemporaries and successors, Farr was a First Wave Feminist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries she publicly advocated for suffrage, workplace equality, and equal protection under the law for women, writing a book and many articles in intellectual journals on the rights of the modern woman.

Florence Beatrice Farr was born in Bickley, Kent, England in 1860, the youngest of the eight children of Mary Elizabeth Whittal and Dr. William Farr. She was named after nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale by her father, a physician and hygienist who was a friend and colleague of Nightingales. Dr. Farr was known as an advocate of equal education and professional rights for women, who doubtlessly influenced his daughters attitudes in their later lives.

Source: Wikipedia