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.
The title-page quotes from Shakespeare
(What's past is Prologue) and Cicero
(That cannot be said too often which is not yet understood).
Moore, Edith Mary. The Defeat of Woman. C.W. Daniel Co.
prelims
The chapters run from Women and the Struggle...
Intertextuality and Influence
Caroline Norton
The verse narrative is written in rhyming couplets, sometimes in very regular pentameter and at others in quite irregular metre that reflects, for instance, the anguish of the speaker's musings on memory and death. Stylistically...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Caroline Norton
The early part of the work summarizing the legal position of women reads much like Barbara Leigh Smith
's A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women, published the...
Textual Features
Ann Oakley
This book covers a great deal of ground. When it turns back from Modern Problems to A Brief History of Methodology its exemplars include Margaret Cavendish
(who also provides one of three opening epigraphs), the...
Reception
Christabel Pankhurst
Nearly twenty years later Sylvia Pankhurst
accused this book of sensationalism and of preaching the sex war deprecated and denied by the older Suffragists.
Purvis, June, and Maureen Wright. “Writing Suffragette History: the contending autobiographical narratives of the Pankhursts”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
14
, No. 3/4, pp. 405-33.
419
In the later twentieth century it was dismissed by a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jean Plaidy
In the Victorian-era Secret for a Nightingale (titled from the vocation of Florence Nightingale
) the heroine's husband has died from drug abuse and her baby from his neglect of it. She blames her family...
Family and Intimate relationships
Eleanor Rathbone
ER
's father was the sixth William Rathbone
in a Lancashire family which was Quaker
, Unitarian
, Liberal
and philanthropic. For six generations this family had been the epitome of fair trading, plain speaking...
Residence
Mary Seacole
Her Wonderful Adventures attributes to pure racism the failure to take up her offer. She attempted unsuccessfully to meet with the Secretary-at-War, then with someone from the office of the Quartermaster General, then the Medical...
Residence
Mary Seacole
En route, she stopped at Florence Nightingale
's hospital at Scutari; her offer of assistance was declined, and she was put up for the night in the room of a washerwoman.
Seacole, Mary, and William L. Andrews. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Oxford University Press.
90-1
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Seacole
MS
positions herself throughout the text not as an independent woman who needed to support herself by selling meals, goods, and medical services, but rather as a selfless woman dedicated to the service of others:...
Reception
Mary Seacole
The Times demanded in November 1856 when MS
's financial straits became known: While the benevolent deeds of Florence Nightingale
are being handed down to posterity . . . are the humbler actions of Mrs...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Louisa Catherine Shore
Other poems in the collection are more interesting, if no less devoted to British nationalism, including the title piece, which presents an extended parallel between the poet and the soldier whose genius writes in words...
Education
Penelope Shuttle
Some sources say that PS
attended a secondary modern school in Staines (that is one with non-academic aims and expectations). But attendance at a private school is strongly implied by her poem about a girls'...
Friends, Associates
Felicia Skene
From her youth FS
was accustomed to mixing with distinguished people. Sir Walter Scott
, a friend of both of her parents, found her youthful company a relief when he was old and ill. In...
