Who Was Really the First Female Writer on a British Banknote?

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In my younger and bolder days as a university teacher, I was occasionally fond of beginning lectures and seminars with a new group of students by asking them a very straightforward question: who was the first female writer to appear on a British banknote? I’d then brandish an English ten-pound note as a potential prize for the first person who was able to provide me with the correct answer.

(Actually, in truth I still occasionally ask this question, as an ice-breaker with a new seminar group. It depends on how confident I’m feeling that I’ll take home my money with me.)

So, what’s the answer? Who was the first female writer to appear on a British banknote?

The answer, of course, is actually on the ten-pound note itself: Jane Austen.

Except it isn’t. Contrary to popular belief, Austen was not the first female writer to appear on a British banknote, in 2017.

British, note. Not English. That’s the key word here. Scotland has different banknotes from England and Wales. And a year before Jane Austen first appeared on an English tenner in September 2017, another female writer had pipped her to the post in 2016, but on a Royal Bank of Scotland note: the £5, to be precise.

Her name was Nan Shepherd, or Anna Shepherd as she was born in 1893, in Cults, near Aberdeen. She’s probably best-known for The Living Mountain, a book about her experiences walking in the Cairngorms which was only first published in 1977, four years before her death (though it had been written much earlier), and she also wrote a number of novels, beginning with The Quarry Wood in 1928. But she was also a notable modernist poet.

Female poets have always found it harder to make their way into the canon of modernist literature than male ones. It was T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, twin pillars of Anglo-American modernist poetry, who helped to drive the creation of that canon, and initially only a handful of female names – Hilda Doolittle (rechristened ‘H. D.’ by Pound himself) and Marianne Moore are perhaps the most notable, followed by Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell – made it in.

More recently, critics and literary historians have made the case for a host of other voices, among them Mina Loy, Hope Mirrlees, and Nancy Cunard. But British modernists, as distinct from English ones (Mirrlees was born to Scottish parents but was born in Kent and grew up in England), have had an even harder time squeezing their way through the door. Lynette Roberts, a remarkable Welsh modernist poet, attests to this, as does the Scottish Shepherd.

In 1934, Shepherd published a book of her poems, titled In the Cairngorms. Her poem ‘The Hill Burns’ (‘burns’ here referring to streams and brooks), which can be read in full here, ends resoundingly: ‘Out of these mountains, / Out of the defiant torment of Plutonic rock / Leap the clear burns’, a kind of ‘Living water’ which is ‘Seen only by its movement.’ Her poems, out of print for many years, were reissued in 2015.

However, I was too clever for my own good. For I subsequently re-examined my confident pronouncement that Austen was the first female writer on an English note. And perhaps – despite the numerous headlines in the lead-up to the big reveal of the new Austen £10 note in 2017 claiming she was the first – that isn’t wholly true either.

There is actually another woman who has a claim to that honour: Florence Nightingale.

It depends in part on how you define ‘writer’ here. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is, of course, best-known for her work as a nurse. But she did write an influential (albeit slim) book on the topic, Notes on Nursing (1859). Does that qualify her as a ‘writer’? I think so.

But that wasn’t all Nightingale wrote. Several decades ago, when I was an undergraduate, I studied a remarkable early feminist essay by Nightingale, titled ‘Cassandra’, on a module called ‘Other Victorians’, taught by the brilliant genius John Schad. This was back in 2003, and I remember that very few critics and historians had paid Nightingale’s essay much serious attention. A quick glance online in 2025 reveals that scholars of Victorian literature and feminist thought haven’t rushed to correct this.

This is baffling. You can’t even find an open-access copy of Nightingale’s essay online in 2025. Perhaps it didn’t help that ‘Cassandra’ was never ‘published’ during Nightingale’s lifetime, but rather only privately printed, as part of a longer work with the rather awkward title, Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth (1852). The only serious appraisals of ‘Cassandra’, which Nightingale wrote in 1852, are by George P. Landow on Victorian Web, and Laura Monros-Gaspar, in an open-access journal article from 2008 (which is also well worth a read, here). As Nightingale’s title suggests, she casts herself in the role of the prophetess or sage, after the classical Cassandra whose warnings about the Trojan War went unheeded.

‘Cassandra’ is a powerful critique of the way Victorian society wastes the talents and minds of women. British women’s lives are ‘wearied out’ with ‘the springs of will broken’, and Christianity has become debased by false churchmen and corrupt fraudsters. It’s a critique of the place of women in Victorian England, above all else. And Nightingale takes pains to express how women themselves have absorbed the patriarchal system which holds them back:

Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except ‘suckling their fools’; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first ‘claim of social life.’ They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their ‘duty’ to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.

Nightingale wrote and printed ‘Cassandra’ before the Crimean War, during which her services to nursing would make her a celebrity figure and earn her the epithet ‘the lady with the lamp’. So she was a writer before she was a famous nurse, even if she wasn’t a famous writer, and would never become one. Nevertheless, she deserves, perhaps – and with a certain generous broadening of the definition – the honour of being the first woman writer to appear on an English, or indeed a British, banknote.