The common soldiers savior, the standard-bearer of modern nursing, a pioneering social reformer: Florence Nightingale belongs to that select band of historical characters who are instantly recognizable. Home-schooled, bound for the life of an educated Victorian lady, Nightingale scandalized her family when she found her calling as a nurse, a thoroughly unsuitable profession for a woman of her class. As the Lady with the Lamp,” ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal. Few individuals in their own lifetime have reached the level of fame and adulation attained by Nightingale as a result of her efforts. Fewer still have the power of continuing to inspire controversy in the way she does almost a century after her death. In this remarkable book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in more than fifty years, Mark Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw new light on this extraordinary womans life and character. Disentangling elements of myth from the reality, Bostridge has written a vivid and immensely readable account of one of the most iconic figures in modern history.
Mark Bostridge was born in 1961 and was educated at Oxford University. His biography of Vera Brittain, co-authored with Paul Berry, was selected as a book of the year by
The Independent. He lives in England.
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year The common soldiers savior, the standard-bearer of modern nursing, a pioneering social reformer: Florence Nightingale belongs to that select band of historical characters who are instantly recognizable. Home-schooled, bound for the life of an educated Victorian lady, Nightingale scandalized her family when she found her calling as a nurse, a thoroughly unsuitable profession for a woman of her class. As the Lady with the Lamp,” ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal. Few individuals in their own lifetime have reached the level of fame and adulation attained by Nightingale as a result of her efforts. Fewer still have the power of continuing to inspire controversy in the way she does almost a century after her death. In this remarkable book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in more than fifty years, Mark Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw new light on this extraordinary womans life and character. Disentangling elements of myth from the reality, Bostridge has written a vivid and immensely readable account of one of the most iconic figures in modern history.
"'Florence Nightingale,' concludes an illustrated children's biography from 1959, 'will always be famous among the great women not only of England, but of the world. The efficient hospitals and devoted nurses of to-day owe an immortal debt to her, and through them the lives of all of us have been affected by the work of this great and gracious lady.' From such acorns mighty oaks do grow. As a child, Mark Bostridge was given that 50-page biography by his mother. Now, many years and 500 pages later, Mr. Bostridge has produced Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon, a dense and compelling biography of a woman who is rightly venerated but often too simplistically understood . . . This picture of Florence Nightingale, according to Mr. Bostridge, is not so much false as one-dimensional. In his telling, she is no longer a behaloed 'gracious lady' but a complicated woman of her time, humorous and wry, often unlikable, always formidable. Her accomplishments were real enough, but Mr. Bostridge assesses them more judiciously than early hagiographers or later scoffers like Lytton Strachey, who included Florence Nightingale in Eminent Victorians (1918), his debunking group portrait of an era . . . Mr. Bostridge transforms the simple outline of her life into a full and masterly portrait."Alexandra Mullen, The Wall Street Journal
"Devout and unforgiving, inexhaustible and chronically unwell, the farsighted and exacting Florence Nightingale famously gnawed her way through the barriers that kept genteel Victorian women trapped 'in a meaningless round of trivial occupations' in order to promote her vision of a modern public health-care system. Both driven (her selected writings will fill a projected 16 volumes) and driving (she could be said to have worked two of her loyal supporters to death), she always put her cause first, with remarkable results. As Bostridge notes, to Nightingale, 'earthly friendships' were merely 'a hindrance on the path to true righteousness.' All this we knew from Lytton Strachey's biting and elegant 1918 portrait in Eminent Victorians, a book that's famously debunking; Strachey had a keen eye for Nightingale's acerbity and a relish for describing it, but also plainly admired her achievements and her courage. Bostridge, author of a biography of Vera Britain, doesn't fundamentally alter that picture but, by virtue of his prodigious research, enormously enriches it with the nuance and detail that fill in the nooks and crannies of a real, and enormously complicated, personality. Absorbing, superbly written, and authoritative, this is a terrific biography of a woman to whom we owe a great deal, but would perhaps never want to meet."The Atlantic Monthly
"In this fascinating biography, written with clear-eyed respect and affection for its subject, Mark Bostridge examines and dismantles the many myths, both hagiographical and debunking, that have hardened like barnacles around the real story of Florence Nightingale. The rumour, for example, that she suffered syphilis gets short shrift, as do claims, based on a youthful correspondence full of flowery endearments, that she was a lesbian. Bostridge steers a firm course between the Florence favoured by her devoteesthe Lady with the Lampand the cold, inhuman number-cruncher of the revisionists. In doing so, he returns us to the enormity of the real woman's achievements. By sheer will and an intellect that combined creativity and detailed analysis, Nightingale changed the way we perceive public health. Once she had started on her mission, she never stopped: when crippled by excruciating brucellosis, bed-bound for decades, she set about writing a vast report on 'improving the health of India.' Even the best-known of her early detractors, Lytton Strachey, who decided her energy could only be the result of repressed erotic urges, was forced into admiration for her achievements. It was what he perceived as her 'religiosity' that he found repellent, and he sniggered that 'in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and drains.' Bostridge is particularly good on Florence's religious faith, and he has read widely among the influences and ideas that informed it. Though she said she was inspired by the voice of God calling her in her youth, her deep religious belief was mystical, unorthodox and free of any taint of religiosity. It had little to do with church or piety, or even Christ. On both sides, the Nightingales were of dissenting stock, and she was brought up among free-thinking, intellectually adventurous Unitarians who enjoyed a stimulating combination of public purpose and private inquiry. She disliked religious ritual and seemed not to ally herself with any denomination; it was science that illuminated divine purpose to her, and in particular the new discipline of statistics, which she considered, as Bostridge puts it, 'a sacred science which could permit man to read the mind of God.' One of her unsung legacies is the popularisation of statistical data by the use of pie-charts and diagrams. Other well-known Nightingale narratives are re-examined by Bostridgeand many are at least half discarded. Her mother, Fanny, is not here the caricature of popular legend, the social-climbing tyrant who bound her to a relentless round of balls, light philanthropy and netting purses. Florence's elder sister, Parthenope, is still tiresome, with her debilitating, monomaniacal obsession with her brilliant sibling; but she is not absurd. This is a much more rounded, complex and plausible picture of the conditions in which Florence's extraordinary personality came to fruition. There is something unnervingsomething strange and therefore interestingin the intensity of the young Florence's desire to do something; her determination, adhered to at painful cost, to remain unmarried in order to fulfill a destiny which was at that point still cloudy to her. She was not interested in saints but she has some of the characteristics associated with sainthoodnone of them anything to do with being nice. From Bostridge's careful account, we can begin to imagine what Fanny Nightingale, an intelligent woman, might have feared in her daughter's ambitions. Aged six, Florence was making graphs on the efficacy of prayer; aged nine, she was reading Homer in Greek. By her early twenties she was corresponding on philosophy, theology and sanitation with some of the most powerful thinkers and public servants of her timefriends and guests of her parentsincluding Sidney Herbert, who as Secretary of War was to commission her 15 years later to lead 40 nurses to the Barrack Hospital at Scutari. Bostridge doesn't labour the point but he does convincingly demonstrate that the world of the Victorian woman born into a wealthy family with a respect for the life of the mind was not wholly the spiral of 'busy nothings' that Parthenope once described it as. Bostridge's portrait of Florence herself is also even-handed and sympathetic. She emerges as a lover of humanity rather than a lover of individual humans, with a mind that could scythe through obfuscating bureaucratic reports on hospital conditions or the iniquitously inefficient Poor Laws, which had rotted deep into the 19th-century social psyche. She bore long grudges, enjoyed intrigue and, despite her lamplit patrols among the wounded at Scutari, had, as her friend the poet Arthur Clough put it, 'a high, steady benevolence' rather than the warmth of human empathy. Though her prodigious cleverness and engagement had dazzled when she was young, in celebrated middle-age she was formidable rather than charmingeven her loyal Aunt Mai described her as 'often cold and dry, some might say cross.' Mark Bostridge has produced a fine study of a complex and remarkable woman. There will be other lives of Florence Nightingale but it is hard to imagine one that brings her hard, driven brilliance back to life with such intelligence, imagination and sympathy."Lucy Lethbridge, The Observer (UK)
"This well-written, exhaustively researched biography is admirable."Phyllis T. Smith, Historical Novels Review
"Thoroughgoing biography of the Englishwoman whose service during the Crimean War and subsequent writings revolutionized the disciplines of nursing and public health. Florence Nightingale (18201910) is a legendary name whose historical significance remains shrouded in myth. Bostridge (co-author, Vera Brittain, 1995) does an admirable job of demythologizing the 'lady with the lamp,' so called after an iconic depiction of her administering to soldiers appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1855. The biography's first section concerns Nightingale's intense frustration with the stifling dictates of upper-middle-class life. Educated at home by progressive, well-connected parents, she grew up with an elder sister at the family estate in Derbyshire, longing always to embrace an occupation that would enable her to minister to the sick and the poor: nursing. But nurses at the time were basically untrained domestic servants, and her family used emotional blackmail to dissuade Nightingale from a profession deemed unsuitable for a lady of her class. She was nearly 30 when she finally managed to undergo rudimentary nursing training in Germany, 33 when she became superintendent of London's Upper Harley Street Establishment for Gentlewomen During Illness. Horrified by eyewitness accounts from the Crimean War of ghastly conditions, neglect and mismanagement of the wounded, Nightingale in 1854 used her connections to help organize an expedition of nurses to the Scutari Hospital in Istanbul. The success of this operation jump-started her commitment to the reform of sanitary conditions in the British army (especially in India), hospitals and workhouses. She used her prestige to raise money to found a Nightingale Training School for nurses at St. Thomas' Hospital, London, in 1860. She also wrote widely; books such as Notes on Nursing and the novella Cassandra are neglected documents of mid-19th-century feminism. Reminding readers that much of Nightingale's life was spent as an invalid, Bostridge underscores the significance of her public-health accomplishments. He considers the sentimental appeal of Nightingale's legend, while trying not to be 'beguiled by her heady sense of the dramatic.' Deeply informativeBostridge probes reverently but with confidence."Kirkus Reviews
"The popular image of Florence Nightingale as the crusading "Lady with the Lamp" who brought nursing care to the casualties of the Crimean War and her status as a beloved icon of the nursing field have long obscured the more nuanced story of her life's work. Bostridge (coauthor, with Paul Berry, Vera Brittain: A Life) presents a lengthy, well-researched, and comprehensive biography of Nightingale, drawing heavily on letters, diaries, and other primary sources in a successful effort to create a balanced and authentic portrait of the woman, not the myth. Beginning with moving depictions of Nightingale's struggles to be allowed to pursue her calling despite her family's objections, Bostridge skillfully illuminates the spiritual and philosophical motivations that drove Nightingale's impassioned and lifelong dedication to the causes of nursing and public health reform. Even as Nightingale's fame grew with her Crimean work, political infighting and incompetent military management bedeviled her efforts to improve conditions at wartime hospitals. Bostridge is never in awe of his subject and does not shrink from hard examination of historical controversies, such as the cause of Nightingale's withdrawal from society, that other biographies such as Hugh Small's Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel have raised (with different conclusions)."Ingrid Levin, Library Journal
The common soldiers savior, the standard-bearer of modern nursing, a pioneering social reformer: Florence Nightingale belongs to that select band of historical characters who are instantly recognizable. Home-schooled, bound for the life of an educated Victorian lady, Nightingale scandalized her family when she found her calling as a nurse, a thoroughly unsuitable profession for a woman of her class. As the “Lady with the Lamp,” ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal. Few individuals in their own lifetime have reached the level of fame and adulation attained by Nightingale as a result of her efforts. Fewer still have the power of continuing to inspire controversy in the way she does almost a century after her death. In this remarkable book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in more than fifty years, Mark Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw new light on this extraordinary womans life and character. Disentangling elements of myth from the reality, Bostridge has written a vivid and immensely readable account of one of the most iconic figures in modern history.
In this remarkable book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in more than 50 years, Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw new light on this extraordinary woman's life and character.