Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Florence Nightingale
-
Standard Name: Nightingale, Florence
Birth Name: Florence Nightingale
Nickname: Flo
Nickname: The Lady-in-Chief
Nickname: The Lady of the Lamp
Nickname: Commander-in-Chief
Nickname: Wild Ass of the Wilderness
FN
's fame began when she headed nurses in the Crimean war. After the war, she worked to reform health care and promoted sanitation at home and abroad. To this end she composed speeches, government reports, statistical analyses, articles, and pamphlets. She travelled extensively in her youth, producing many letters which were later collected and published. She also wrote theology, including the work which contains her feminist fragment Cassandra. Although FN
was a versatile, political, and prolific writer (she produced over two hundred literary works during her career), she is remembered almost solely for her nursing work.
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 166. Gale Research, 1996.
Her broad definition of sisters of charity extends to nurses, doctors, and poor law guardians, the managers of hospitals and charitable institutions, and women workers in prisons, reformatories and ragged schools. Her argument hinges on...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Jenkins
She describes how Tennyson, suffering from depression or nervous complaints, turned to Dr James Manby Gully and his celebrated Malvern water cure. She ranks Gully's medical abilities and his record of healing very highly. She...
From this time on, JT
sometimes published a new book as Caroline Harvey, and sometimes reassigned to her pseudonym works first issued under her own name. Leaves from the Valley, for instance (whose...
Textual Production
Catherine Marsh
The book includes frequent letters to and from Marsh's sisters as well as her close friend Caroline Maitland
. She also kept a regular correspondence with Florence Nightingale
, Hedley Vicars
, the Archbishop of Canterbury
She ends this part of the volume not with her own signature but by quoting what she represents as an encouraging prayer or blessing from Florence Nightingale
, who tells Marsden she prays the Father...
Textual Production
P. D. James
PDJ
returned to a hospital setting for her fourth mystery novel, Shroud for a Nightingale, which brought her high praise from critics and introduced her to a major world market.
The title, of course...
Textual Production
Matilda Hays
With Bessie Rayner Parkes
, MH
co-edited the English Woman's Journal, for which she also wrote on such subjects as Harriet Hosmer
and Florence Nightingale
.
Rendall, Jane. “A Moral Engine? Feminism, Liberalism and the English Womans JournalEqual or Different: Womens Politics 1800-1914, edited by Jane Rendall, Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 112-38.
116, 120
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Textual Production
Matilda Hays
An article by MH
on Florence Nightingale
and the English Soldier appeared in the English Woman's Journal.
Rendall, Jane. “A Moral Engine? Feminism, Liberalism and the English Womans JournalEqual or Different: Womens Politics 1800-1914, edited by Jane Rendall, Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 112-38.
129, 265n60
Textual Production
Elspeth Huxley
EH
thought a perfect precept for biography was voiced by Shakespeare
's Othello: nothing extenuate, nor set down ought in malice.
qtd. in
Nicholls, C. S. Elspeth Huxley. HarperCollins, 2002.
Harvey, Kathryn. "Driven by War into Politics": A Feminist Biography of Kathleen Innes. University of Alberta, 1995.
216
Textual Production
Harriet Martineau
This paper, a challenger to the Times, favoured free trade and other liberal causes.
Chapman, Maria Weston, and Harriet Martineau. “Memorials of Harriet Martineau”. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, James R. Osgood, 1877, pp. 2: 131 - 596.
449
Webb, Robert Kiefer. Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian. Columbia University Press, 1960.
314
HM
wrote on everything from politics to agriculture, and from geography and history to the East and West...
Textual Production
Lettice Cooper
LC
issued further biographies of eminent Victorians designed for young people: The Young Florence Nightingale, 1960, The Young Victoria, 1961, The Young Edgar Allan Poe, 1964, and A Hand Upon the Time...
Textual Production
Harriet Martineau
Although Martineau appeared as the book's sole author, she and Nightingale
were in effect collaborators. The latter solicited her help on the issue of sanitary reform, and supplied the data, including printer's plates for statistical...
