Voices from history

Perhaps the best known of Helen's chosen quartet is Mary Seacole, the Creole (as she described herself) nurse in the Crimea, whose story has come to prominence in the last few years and is now taught as part of the history curriculum in British schools.

Helen was first drawn to Mary when she was commissioned to write for The Encyclopaedia of Women Social Reformers, an American publication. Her subsequent research revealed that Mary was the daughter of a Scottish Army Officer and his Jamaican wife.

Mary Grant (as she was born) was a herbalist with an entrepreneurial business sense and an inborn urge to nurture and heal - all this she learned and inherited from her mother. Her taste for travel and adventure was perhaps her own.

She married an Essex man, Edwin Seacole, who had come to the West Indies, like so many, to find his fortune. He found his fortune in marrying Mary, but not in the financial interpretation of the word.

Together they ran a not-very-successful provisions store but, never a healthy man, Edwin died after only eight years of marriage and Mary's mother died soon after.

Devastated by her double bereavement, Mary sought an outlet for her energy. Turned down as a nurse by the British authorities, she made her own way to the Crimea during the war 1854-6, where she ran a clinic. This was to bankrupt her when the war ended but, at the time, made her a household name in Britain. However, after the initial euphoria following the end of the war, she was gradually forgotten and died in obscurity.

The encyclopaedia entry had to be brief of necessity, but Helen was so excited by Mary's story that she determined to write her biography. But, of course, the commission had to be finished first. In the event she was pipped to the post by Jane Robinson's The Black Nightingale (published 2005).

Jane Robinson and Helen Rappaport were destined to come together when Channel 4 made their acclaimed drama/documentary The Real Angel of the Crimea with a touching portrayal of Mary by the actress Angela Bruce.

Helen's almost psychic link with Mary was to take an extraordinary turn when a telephone call came out of the blue, through the Crimean War Research Society, from a friend who said: "A friend of mine has been approached by a dealer who has acquired a picture of a black woman wearing medals . . . ."

Helen says something ran through her blood as those words were spoken and she felt strongly that it must be Mary Seacole's image.

To cut a very long story short, Helen borrowed money and bought the painting. The next step was to have it authenticated.

After all the standard tests and tracing the hitherto unknown artist, Albert Charles Challen (who died at the age of 34), the picture has been officially accepted as the only known oil painting of Mary Seacole.

After a few magical weeks of having it hang in her own living room - Helen said she felt a sense of companionship every time she entered the room during that time - it became clear to her that it was only right that the picture be shared with the nation. It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

Sandy Nairne, director of the gallery, said: "This is a wonderful discovery. A painted portrait allows us to appreciate the important 19th-century figure of Mary Seacole in new ways."

In 2006, the image appeared on a British stamp, for which Helen was paid the princely sum of £150 - the standard Post Office fee.

Helen's other characters are violinist George Bridgetower, a child prodigy, Phillis Wheatley, a slave girl from Senegambia who became a published poetess, and Ira Aldridge, the preacher's son from Manhattan who became a Shakespearian actor.

The son of a West Indian slave, George Bridgetower was a virtuoso violinist at the age of ten. Presented by Haydn and his father, Frederick Bridgetower as The African Prince' he performed in Bath, Bristol, The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and so impressed the then Prince of Wales that he paid for the boy (partly to get him away from his exploitative father) to receive tuition in Paris.

After being acclaimed by no lesser man than Beethoven, George continued to play and to climb the ladder of London's musical hierarchy, in 1807 becoming a fellow of the Royal Society of Musicians and in 1811 taking his Bachelor of Music degree at Cambridge.

Phillis Wheatley, a seven-year-old Fulah slave girl from Senegambia, was sold to a liberal-minded, prosperous Boston merchant who gave her a classical education.

Proving in her teens to be a precocious poet, in 1773 she became America's first-ever published black writer (male or female).

However, in order to achieve publication she had to bring her poetry to London, where it was published under the sponsorship of the evangelical leader, the Countess of Huntingdon. Phillis became a literary sensation at the time but, tragically, she never fulfilled her potential, dying young after losing all three of her children, and being buried in a now long-forgotten grave.

Born in New York in 1807, Ira Aldridge became a consummate Shakespearian actor (a subsequent inspiration to Paul Robeson). For a while he was taken up' by society and played, first of all, obvious lead parts in Othello but subsequently was whited up' to play the lead roles in King Lear and Richard III.

Forced by racial prejudice to leave New York and London he pursued his career on the Continent, to great acclaim. However, the price he was to pay was that he became a rootless artistic wanderer. He died in Lodz, Poland, in 1867.

What is there in Helen's background that has led to this study that has turned into a passion? She started life as a linguist; she read Russian at Leeds University but rejected the Foreign Office for life as an actress.

However, there was always a writer trying to get out and this, combined with her knowledge of Russian, led her to become the currently acclaimed modern translator of all of Chekhov's seven plays as performed in the National, Almeida and Royal Shakespeare Theatres in the past decade.

Two marriages and two daughters later, she has turned back to an earlier love, history, and has applied the same strength and depth of caring to this subject. She is now an established historical writer, her most recent history book being No Place for Ladies, an account of women's roles in the Crimean War whether they be wives, camp followers, nurses or tourists watching the battles from the surrounding hills.

There is a lighter side to Helen's writing, as demonstrated in her most recent publication, Dark Hearts of Chicago, written with co-author, William Horwood. Together they have created a feisty young heroine, Emily Strauss, who is determined to become one of America's first female newspaper investigative reporters.

Emily is commissioned to go to Chicago during the World's Trade Fair and look for a missing (abducted?) young woman. A dark and murky world is uncovered, historical accuracy guaranteed by Helen.

Helen's current project is a commissioned history of the last days of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and the children - Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and the Tsarevich Alexei - leading up to their execution by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Helen has been on a research trip to Ekaterinburg. The Ipatiev House, where the Royal Family were kept prisoners, has been pulled down and the site is unmarked as if to erase the deed that took place there.

Absorbed as she is with her project and, indeed, working with her beloved Russian language, Helen Rappaport is still carrying a large candle for her beloved quartet and hoping a publisher somewhere will consider her subjects worthy of a book.

The title of Helen's book A Long Way from Home is taken from a beautiful old Negro spiritual In an age when we should be honouring our black heroines and heroes and teaching our children about them, let's hope Helen's manuscript does not go unsung for too much longer.