Miss Jessie Graham Hope

Jessie Margaret Hope was born on January 15, 1870 at Parsloes in Essex, England, to Colonel William Hope and Margaret Cunninghame Graham. Her father, a member of the cadet branch of the Earls of Hopetoun, was a diplomat and army officer who was awarded the Victoria Cross for saving the life of a lieutenant during the Crimean War. Her mother was the great granddaughter of author Robert Cunninghame Graham of Gartmore. She had a sister and a brother, Adrian Hope, who was the Secretary of the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. At the age of three and a half, Jessie fell down a flight of stairs and spent three years in a children’s hospital in Wales. She was physically disabled for most of her life.

Writing under the pen name Graham Hope, Jessie published seven novels, many of which were rooted in historical events. Her novels included A Cardinal and His Conscience (1900), My Lord Winchenden (1902), The Triumph of Count Ostermann (1903), The Gage of Red and White (1904), The Lady of Lyte (1905), Amalia (1907), and The Honour of "X" (1908). Jessie conducted research for her historical novels at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. 

Jessie joined the Society of Women Journalists in the spring of 1910. She was a councilmember from 1910 to 1913 and served as vice-chairman of the council in 1911-1912. Writing in The Woman Journalist, Jessie credited women journalists’ earnestness for bringing pride to the profession, declaring that “to us it seems like more than a career. It is a mission with vast possibilities which rank it with the school or the pulpit.” The journalist  “wanders gaily through the world as a troubadour knight-errant, armed with fountain pen instead of spear—tilting at evils of all kinds, chanting the good deeds of small and great alike, translating philosophy into words understood of the people, appealing always and everywhere to the common humanity which binds together young and old, rich and poor—even men and women.”

Jessie worked as the Organizing Secretary of the Women’s Amalgamated Unionist and Tariff Reform Association for four years in the 1910s, during which time she toured England to address village meetings. Accounts describe Jessie as an effective public speaker. She also collaborated with the People’s Palaces Association to establish temperance hotels. Jessie was a member of the Writers’ Club and one of the very few women Freemasons in England at the time.

Jessie died on April 20, 1920,  at the age of 50.