Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend by Mark Bostridge

A century later, Mark Bostridge has produced a full, scholarly and compellingly authoritative biography of The Lady with the Lamp and confirmed Strachey's impression of a thoroughly disagreeable but complex and puzzling subject.

Nightingale was a serious and selfreflective child, younger of two daughters in a tight-knit, neurotic family of wealthy Unitarians. Her father's life of inactivity aroused her contempt; she longed for service and status, but not in marriage. Bostridge very deftly links Florence's restlessness to that of a whole generation of young women responding to Jane Eyre's cry that women "must have action" and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Florence found it through an impeccable channel; "God spoke to me," she said, licensing her sense of destiny. Quite what destiny took several years to work out.

Florence was always keen on statistics, reports and parliamentary documents and had thought of training as a nurse in order to set up her own sisterhood, but her family opposed it. Her anger and frustration made the atmosphere at home poisonous; coming back from a fortnight with the Protestant deaconesses at Kaiserswerth, her Christmas greeting was "I feel myself perishing when I go to bed ... I wish it were my grave".

Not surprisingly, the family caved in eventually and in 1853 Florence took up the post of superintendent of a gentlewomen's home in Harley Street, from where she soon extended her influence to superintending nurses at King's College Hospital. This was the period during which newspaper reports from the Crimea galvanised British public opinion with first-hand witness of the horrors of the war, and Florence, who was more ambitious than she was compassionate, saw a prime career opportunity. In collaboration with the charismatic Secretary of State for War, Sidney Herbert, she got up a small group of nuns and nurses and set off for Scutari.

It turns out that Florence Nightingale wasn't actually very good at what she is known for — nursing — and was rarely seen mopping a fevered brow or bandaging the wounds of the dying. Administration was more her thing, and she was undoubtedly using her famous lamp to check her requisitions rather than shed a kindly light on the miserably suffering soldiery (most of whom died from sickness rather than their battle-wounds).

When she returned to England after a year of sometimes rather chaotic and contentious interaction with the Army and the War Office, she carried on her real work — of campaigning for better hospital design, better sanitation and preventative care — with single-minded zeal.

It went on for almost 60 years, most of which Nightingale spent as an invalid, suffering the after-effects of what Bostridge thinks was probably brucellosis contracted in the Crimea. From her sofa, she fired off long harangues to the government and domineered over a succession of meek protégées. Was she a lesbian? Mark Bostridge doesn't tell us what he thinks about that, but Florence's interest in cross-dressers, frequent use of male pronouns for herself, and offer to be "husband" to the first woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, give one pause.

There's also a strange story of how the apparently hopeless invalid was spotted by a cousin "sailing along down the little glade" at her old family home, thinking herself unobserved. Was her illness madly exaggerated? Certainly, the kind of nursing Nightingale seems to have done best was nursing grievances, paying back her closest family for their early opposition to her ambitions with a lifetime of vicious complaint and heartless ostracism. It's a good job for all of us that she channelled some of that violent will into public service..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

The soldier's saviour, the standard-bearer of modern nursing, a pioneering social reformer - and much else besides - Florence Nightingale belongs to that select band of historical characters who are instantly recognisable. As the Lady with the Lamp, ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal, and one that is permanently lodged in the national consciousness. She has been honoured and admired, criticised and ridiculed. More often than not, she has been misrepresented and misunderstood.In this remarkable book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in over fifty years, Mark Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw significant new light on this extraordinary woman's life and character. By 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 British history.