Nightingales: Florence And Her Family

The compelling history of an extraordinary, complex and prominent Victorian family whose fate it was to have a brilliant daughter - Florence - who wanted to change the world.

Florence Nightingale is history's most famous nurse, the epitome of gently, nurturing femininity. But behind the public image of 'The Lady with the Lamp' was a brilliant, combative, complicated woman, struggling to escape a web of social prejudice and familial expectations.

From girlhood, Florence wanted to dedicate her life to nursing in public hospitals, even though nursing was then work done only by women of the lowest classes. Florence's family - her father Wen, her mother Fanny, her elder sister Parthenope - were determined to stop her. The Nightingales were a rich, cultured, liberal Victorian family, part of England's social and cultural elite. Their friends included Lord Palmerston, Lord Shaftesbury, Elizabeth Gaskell the novelist, and the young mathematician Ada Byron Lovelace. Florence's family counted on her to make a brilliant match, and bitter fights broke out when she refused the eminently suitable writer and man-about-town, Richard Monckton Milnes.

At last Florence had her way, and her nursing mission took her to the filthy, disease-ridden military hospitals of Scutari and Balaclava. Her work during the Crimean War made her an international heroine, and thereafter she wielded an influence over public health policy that was unparalleled for a woman of the time.

Radical in her ideas, eccentric in her way of life, Florence was often at war with her family, but love and loyalty always triumphed in the end. The other three Nightingales adored and criticised her, understood and misread her, supported and thwarted her, defined and were defined by her.

'Nightingales' brings the dynamic and complicated social milieu of the Victorian age dramatically to life. In Gillian Gill's absorbing biography, fascinating new light is shed not just on one of the era's most influential social figures, but on the entire era through which the young Florence and her family lived.