Arabella Kenealy

Kenealy was born in Portslade in 1859. She was the second of the eleven children of Elizabeth and Edward Kenealy. Her siblings included Alexander who became the editor of the Daily Mirror and her sister Annesley who was also a writer.[http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/778053.Arabella_Kenealy Arabella Kenally], Goodreads, Retrieved 15 April 2017 Her father became a notorious Queen's Counsel barrister after his unusual behaviour in the Tichborne Case.Angelique Richardson, 'Kenealy, Arabella Madonna (1859–1938)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2015 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50057, accessed 15 April 2017] She became a doctor at the London School of Medicine for Women after a home education. Kenealy started to practise medicine in 1888 but diphtheria obliged her to give up medicine in 1894.[https://faculty.nipissingu.ca/annbg/darwin/arabellakenealy.htm Arabella Kenealy] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161006151717/http://faculty.nipissingu.ca/annbg/darwin/arabellakenealy.htm |date=6 October 2016 }}, Nipissingu.ca, Retrieved 15 April 2017

In 1893 she wrote Dr Janet of Harley Street{{cite book|author=Kenealy, Arabella|title=Dr Janet of Harley Street|year=1894|edition=2nd|location=London|publisher=Digby, Long & Co|url=https://archive.org/details/06933575.2364.emory.edu}} which was successful. Its lead character is a female physician who adopts a younger woman who is escaping from an unhappy marriage. During 1896-1897 Kenealy wrote a series of stories about Lord Syfret. Syfret was an aristocrat who becomes involved in horrifying, and sometimes supernatural, situations.{{cite book|author=Paul Green|title=Encyclopedia of Weird Detectives |date=2019|publisher=McFarland|isbn=9781476678009|page=106}} One of the Syfret tales was a short Gothic story called "A Beautiful Vampire".{{Cite journal|last=Swenson|first=Kristine|date=1 March 2003|title=The menopausal vampire: arabella kenealy and the boundaries of true womanhood|journal=Women's Writing|volume=10|issue=1|pages=27–46|doi=10.1080/09699080300200257|issn=0969-9082}}{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IbtvAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA207|title=In Lady Audley's Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres|author=Tomaiuolo, Saverio|publisher=Edinburgh University Press|year=2010|page=207|isbn=9780748686940}}File:Not dancing Arabella Kenealy.png1895 saw her letter to the British Medical Journal published. In the letter she reported that she had refused treatment to a pregnant woman with syphilis after seeing that she already had a child with congenital syphilis. Kenealy, like other doctors, found the effects of syphilis troubling. This was the first account of a woman doctor advising on the treatment of a sexually transmitted disease. Kenealy was a eugenicist and she asks BMJ readers to advise on whether failing to assist the "birth of such a child as laid its dull misshapen head against my knee that morning" was a good course of action.{{Cite web|url=https://perceptionsofpregnancy.com/2014/09/01/reproductive-complications-syphilis-gonorrhoea/|title='Such mental suffering and such misery': Reproductive complications resulting from syphilis and gonorrhoea, 1880-1914|last=Meehan|first=Dr Ciara|date=2014-09-01|website=Perceptions of Pregnancy|access-date=2017-04-17}} Her question drew mixed responses and some medical men attacked her approach.

Her book Feminism and Sex Extinction (1920) focused on what she perceived as the harmful effects of the women's rights movement.

Kenealy was intrigued by the effect that the Earth's rotation might have on evolution. Her 1934 book explained "the phenomenon of sex: its origin and development and its significance in the evolutionary process."{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EEQ1AQAAIAAJ|title=The human gyroscope: a consideration of the gyroscopic rotation of earth as mechanism of the evolution of terrestrial living forms: explaining the phenomenon of sex: its origin and development and its significance in the evolutionary process|last=Kenealy|first=Arabella|date=1934-01-01|publisher=J. Bale, Sons & Danielsson, ltd.|language=en}} She believed that people from the northern hemisphere were more male. Moreover, she wrote that every part of the cosmos had male and female aspects; this included people who had more maleness on the right side of their bodies. Women were told to take exercise but they were warned that too much exercise could make women's bodies to lose their natural abilities to be the "mother of men".{{cite book|author=Kathleen McCrone|title=Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women (RLE Sports Studies): 1870-1914|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZbZwAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA274|date=24 April 2014|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1-317-67964-6|page=259}}

Men were also criticised by Kenealy for spending too much time dancing. She considered that they should spend more time thinking about marriage. This view was parodied in the magazine Punch.[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14229/14229-h/14229-h.htm Punch, or The London Charivari], 21 November 1891, Punch, volume 101, Retrieved 15 April 2017{{cite journal|author=Kenealy, Arabella|title=A New View of the Surplus of Women|journal=The Westminster Review|year=1891|volume=136|pages=465–475|url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015009223739;view=1up;seq=481}}

Kenealy was an anti-vivisectionist.Heilmann, Ann. (2004). Anti-Feminism in the Victorian Novel. Thoemmes Continuum. p. 19. {{ISBN|978-1843710127}}

She died in Marylebone in 1938 and was buried at St Helen's Church, Hangleton.

Kenealy was one of the people chosen by Martin Gardner in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.{{cite book|author=Martin Gardner|title=Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=X0HCAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA243|date=4 May 2012|publisher=Courier Corporation|isbn=978-0-486-13162-7|pages=243–}}

• [https://archive.org/details/womanshadownovel00keneiala Woman and the Shadow: A Novel] (1898)
• [https://archive.org/details/b21465514/page/n3/mode/2up The Failure of Vivisection and the Future of Medical Research] (1909)
• [https://archive.org/details/whipsoftime00keneiala The Whips of Time] (1909)
• [https://archive.org/details/feminismsexextin00kenerich Feminism and Sex-Extinction] (1920)

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Category:1859 births

Category:1938 deaths

Category:19th-century British medical doctors

Category:19th-century British women writers

Category:19th-century British writers

Category:19th-century British women medical doctors

Category:English anti-vivisectionists

Category:British eugenicists

Category:English women medical doctors

Category:English short story writers

Category:English horror writers

Category:People from Brighton and Hove

Category:19th-century English women writers

Category:19th-century English people