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.
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
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sophia Jex-Blake
SJB
here discusses the benefit of women doctors in the treatment of female patients. She takes the reader through a timeline of women in medicine, dating back as far as ancient Greece, and including...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Harriet Martineau
Female Industry is a wide-ranging review covering the 1851 census results, the reports of Poor Law Commissioners
on women and children in agriculture, the Governesses' Benevolent Institution
, and The Lowell Offering, as well...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Amabel Williams-Ellis
Her exemplars represent the arts, science, politics, religion, and service to humanity. Two of the nine are female— Sarah Siddons
and Florence Nightingale
.
She dealt with books on such topics as biography, nursing and health issues, slavery, marriage, and North America.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
Among titles she probably covered were Florence Nightingale
's Notes on Nursing, George Browne
's The...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marina Warner
In Our Lady of the CountercultureMW
writes of her own early search for heroinism from heroines like Eleanor of Aquitaine
or Florence Nightingale
(featured in the young people's comic Girl) through scandalous women...
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...
In her introduction, Carey expresses her wish that her sketches of twelve noble and useful lives be read and studied by women of this generation, and go and do thou likewise be written upon some...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Una Marson
Through her editorship of the magazine, UM
drew attention to issues such as single motherhood, women struggling on meagre incomes, and unemployment among domestic workers. This is the age of woman: what man has done...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Harriet Smythies
Towards the end of this poem about the Crimean War, HS
calls on the women of England. She regards them as formed with gentle hands / To minister to suffering,