Ellen Melicent Cobden

Ellen 'Nellie' Millicent Ashburner Sickert (, 18 August 1848 – 4 September 1914), was a British writer, radical campaigner and suffragist. She supported the Irish Home Rule movement, South Africa Conciliation Committee, Women's Social and Political Union and the Women's Freedom League. She published two books and the poem The Rights of Women.

Life Cobden was born Ellen Millicent Ashburner Cobden in 1848 in Manchester, Lancashire, England. Her parents were Richard Cobden, radical MP and leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, and his Welsh wife Catherine Anne Williams. She had four sisters and a brother and was the youngest child of the family. All the children were all encouraged to develop a strong civic consciousness from a young age.

Cobden was formally educated at Miss Jeffreson's School in Brighton, England. In 1856, when she was seven years old, her 15-year-old brother Richard Cobden died of scarlet fever whilst studying at a German boarding school.

Cobden married the painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942) in 1885 at the Marylebone Registry Office. She was 11 years his senior. They spent their honeymoon in Dieppe, France. Her husband commissioned his friend and artist James McNeill Whistler to paint two portraits of her around the time of the marriage, titled Arrangement in Violet and Pink: Mrs Walter Sickert and Green and Violet: Portrait of Mrs Walter Sickert.

Cobden financially supported her husband's own art career, and letter writing campaigns to The Times. She joined the South Africa Conciliation Committee in 1900. In 1910, she participated, alongside her sister Anne Cobden-Sanderson, in the Women's Suffrage Procession, organised by the Women's Freedom League. It was dedicated to her sister Jane.

Under her own name she published the semi-autobiographical work Sylvia Saxon – Episodes in a Life in 1914. The book centred around a spoilt heiress struggling with marital difficulties and social questions The Spectator reviewed the book, stating that "the writer's gifts of intuition and of observation are remarkable".