Frances Power Cobbe was the daughter of a Dublin landowner. She was tutored privately and then sent to a boarding school in Brighton. She lived with her father until his death in 1857, after which she travelled in Europe and then settled in Brighton. She was involved in various philanthropic causes including the schooling of the poor and the treatment of girls in workhouses. From the 1860s she was a committed feminist, writing on such areas as wife-battering and the exclusion of women from the vote ("Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors: Is the Classification Sound"). From the 1870s Cobbe was a devoted anti-vivisectionist, campaigning energetically against the use of live animals in scientific research.