Florence MacLeod Harper was a Canadian journalist from Woodstock, Ontario sent by U.S. newspaper Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper as a staff reporter with an assignment to cover World War I on the Eastern front.
Harper arrived in St. Petersburg via Siberia on a long slow and dirty train.
[2] Dividing her time between staff hospitals on the front line and St. Petersburg,[1] she witnessed first hand the February revolution in St. Petersburg in 1917 and later events in July, before leaving for the U.K. in August, departing on the same boat as Emmeline Pankhurst.
[8] Her testimony has been widely quoted in several later works covering the early stages of the revolution, for instance in Caught in the revolution by Helen Rappaport,[9] but she is less well known than other trailblazing female journalists of the time, such as Louise Bryant who covered the October Revolution of the same year but who was arguably less independent, traveling out with her husband John Reed and arriving at around the time Harper was leaving St. Petersburg.
"In fact, I was so sure of it," Harper later wrote, "that I wandered around the town, up and down the Nevsky, watching and waiting for it as I would for a circus parade.