Emelia Russell Gurney

Emelia Russell Gurney (1823–1896) was an English activist, patron and benefactor. After her marriage she was generally known as Mrs. Russell Gurney.

She was born Emelia Batten, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Ellis Batten (1792–1830), master at Harrow School, and Caroline Venn, daughter of John Venn. A friend of the children of John William Cunningham, and close to James Fitzjames Stephen, she was present in March 1851 when Stephen met Mary Richenda Cunningham, his future wife, for the second time, and fell in love. She herself married Russell Gurney in 1852. He was from the London Baptist family of parliamentary shorthand writers, rather than the Norwich Quaker banking Gurney family of Earlham Hall.

The Gurneys lived in London at 8 Kensington Park Gardens, from around 1854. She was a founder of the Kensington Society of 1865–8, a group of feminists, reformers and suffragists.

A committee was set up after Elizabeth Blackwell lectured on medical training for women, in 1859, and Gurney belonged to it. She helped Elizabeth Garrett, the medical pioneer, with an introduction to William Hawes (1805–1885) (as a grandson of William Hawes (1736–1808) he was related to Russell Gurney); and the Gurneys supported the dispensary Garrett set up in 1866. Emelia confided to Elizabeth Garrett her ambivalence about the use of "feminine arts" to get ahead.

In 1865 she travelled with her husband to Jamaica, a commissioner investigating the handling of the Morant Bay rebellion; and wrote of conditions there, in the form of a journal addressed to her mother.

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