Sarah Biller of St Petersburg

Sarah Biller spent a turbulent childhood as the daughter of Alexander Kilham, Methodist rebel and founder of a breakaway church. In her first job she helped her strong-minded and sometimes unorthodox stepmother Hannah to run a Quaker girls school in Sheffield. In 1820, responding to the tsar's invitation to found an experimental school for poor girls, she travelled alone to St Petersburg and made her career there, eventually as director of a nursing and teaching community. The book focuses on Sarah's activities inside and outside the workplace. It considers ordinary and extraordinary events in her school's daily life, examines how she coped with authority figures often suspicious of foreigners, presents her among her Russian and expatriate friends and colleagues and suggests why she deserves to be remembered. Sarah's story will appeal to people interested in nonconformist, Russian and educational history, Yorkshire patriots and all admirers of pioneering women.