Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale

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Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale

3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 · rating details · 189 ratings · 43 reviews

Florence Nightingale was for a time the most famous woman in Britain–if not the world. We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain’s health-care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, acclaimed author Gillian Gill tells the s...more Florence Nightingale was for a time the most famous woman in Britain–if not the world. We know her today primarily as a saintly character, perhaps as a heroic reformer of Britain’s health-care system. The reality is more involved and far more fascinating. In an utterly beguiling narrative that reads like the best Victorian fiction, acclaimed author Gillian Gill tells the story of this richly complex woman and her extraordinary family.
Born to an adoring wealthy, cultivated father and a mother whose conventional facade concealed a surprisingly unfettered intelligence, Florence was connected by kinship or friendship to the cream of Victorian England’s intellectual aristocracy. Though moving in a world of ease and privilege, the Nightingales came from solidly middle-class stock with deep traditions of hard work, natural curiosity, and moral clarity. So it should have come as no surprise to William Edward and Fanny Nightingale when their younger daughter, Florence, showed an early passion for helping others combined with a precocious bent for power.
Far more problematic was Florence’s inexplicable refusal to marry the well-connected Richard Monckton Milnes. As Gill so brilliantly shows, this matrimonial refusal was at once an act of religious dedication and a cry for her freedom–as a woman and as a leader. Florence’s later insistence on traveling to the Crimea at the height of war to tend to wounded soldiers was all but incendiary–especially for her older sister, Parthenope, whose frustration at being in the shade of her more charismatic sibling often led to illness.
Florence succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. But at the height of her celebrity, at the age of thirty-seven, she retired to her bedroom and remained there for most of the rest of her life, allowing visitors only by appointment.
Combining biography, politics, social history, and consummate storytelling, Nightingales is a dazzling portrait of an amazing woman, her difficult but loving family, and the high Victorian era they so perfectly epitomized. Beautifully written, witty, and irresistible, Nightingales is truly a tour de force.

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Paperback, 592 pages

Published September 13th 2005 by Random House Trade Paperbacks (first published 2004)

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it · review of another edition

"Through the facts [Nightingale] always saw lives," writes Gill, author of books on Agatha Christie and Mary Baker Eddy. Such is also true of Gill, who abandons historical speculation in favor of fastidious reliance on diaries and letters from Nightingale's family, friends, and colleagues. Although one of many existing biographies, Nightingales is one of the first to thoroughly examine the relationship between her public and private life. Besides vividly evoking Austenesque mores, Gill creates f

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Mar 29, 2013 Michele rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-of-2013

A flurry of facts and facets about Florence.

"Florence in particular, from an astonishingly early age, seems to have been writing for an audience." pg 81

I would love to know what happened to Felicetta Sensi. The fact that Florence got her enrolled in school and payed for her education out of her dress money really tell you what an amazing Christian lady Florence was.

Truly astonishing, to see the understanding Florence had of epidemilology before she even knew what a germ was. pg.334

An organized w...more

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Mar 05, 2011 Erin rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography

I barely made it through the Introduction. I really wanted to read about Florence Nightingale, but I am sure there must be a better biography than this one!

The author's writing style was just God-awful! The author could not make a point without re-iterating and re-iterating and re-iterating... "No lady in the land could vote like her husband, enter Parliament like her father, join the India Office like her brother, preach from the pulpit like her nephew, or serve as justice of the peace like th...more

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Oct 11, 2010 Jocie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: didn-t-finish

I was looking for an in-depth view of Miss Nightingale's upbringing and education. Got little snitches of it, but this book focuses mostly on relationships and psychological effects.

Presented a more just view of her mother and sister, I felt.

She had a harsh governess and was away from her parents a good deal for about 2 1/2 years before age 10. She felt from a young age she was different, in a bad way, and was afraid of making mistakes in front of people.

Wanted to impress her parents. Did not fe...more

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May 16, 2010 Lizzie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, read-in-2009

A terrific biography of Florence Nightingale and her family, from a feminist perspective. It’s the kind of detailed biography I love, with little side trips into politics of the day, family history, and military detail.
At the age of 17 FN had a religious experience that convinced her she was to have a life of service to God. From that point, she sought to be trained as a nurse or in the administration of an institution like a hospital.
As one would expect, her upper middle class family tried to...more A terrific biography of Florence Nightingale and her family, from a feminist perspective. It’s the kind of detailed biography I love, with little side trips into politics of the day, family history, and military detail.
At the age of 17 FN had a religious experience that convinced her she was to have a life of service to God. From that point, she sought to be trained as a nurse or in the administration of an institution like a hospital.
As one would expect, her upper middle class family tried to keep her at home and close within the family circle. Much of this book is about Florence’s power struggles with her parents and with other members of her large extended family. For a young woman of her class to become a nurse Just Quite Simply Wasn't Done. But by the time she had taken charge of a home for retired governesses, and then was asked by the government to lead a party of nurses to the army hospital in Turkey, her parents and sister were proud of her, and continued to support her in extraordinary ways for the rest of her life. Her father supported her financially so that she could live independently, unusual for the time even among well to do people. Unmarried daughters were expected to live with their parents.
Because her family was wealthy and socially popular, when she went to the Crimea she had the ears of many powerful men. Eventually it was her skill at organization, more so than her nursing skill (which was considerable) that enabled her to make changes in the way the wounded in the Crimea were treated, and in how the Army dealt with its casualties.
She spend two years in the Army hospital, then for the next fifty two years was virtually a recluse, rarely leaving her home. But during that time she was busy writing, advising, influencing. That is her true legacy.
She had many close women friends but made women enemies, too; she could be clumsy at leading women. Gill makes the interesting observation that most women in this era had little experience of working in collaboration and tended to identify themselves as individuals rather than colleagues. “Discipline, collegiality, and team spirit were not qualities society asked of its women.”
The author is British and gets in some good snarky remarks. “History, as opposed to imaginative literature, is based on evidence, and no one has produced any evidence that Florence Nightingale ever engaged in sexual relations with women. This I assume to be the standard working definition of a lesbian.” About Richard Monckton Milnes, said to have been the man who Florence loved but sacrificed to her vocation (Gill refutes this): “In Turkey, Milnes was invited to a pasha’s dinner party at which the guests were entertained by Greek dancing boys dressed as women. In a letter to his mother, Richard noted that the dance became increasingly ‘lascivious and violent.’ [Biographer:] Pope-Hennessy summarizes: ‘The dance ended with the Turkish guests getting thoroughly involved with the Greek dancing boys. Milnes who had had too much to eat said he dropped off to sleep.’ As a fellow biographer, I can only admire the delicacy of the expression ‘thoroughly involved’ and the positioning of the word ‘said.’”
She’s written biographies of Mary Baker Eddy and Agatha Christie and just did a book about Victoria and Albert. I’ll be looking for these.
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Jun 20, 2009 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, nonfiction, nurses, nursing, women

No nurse's historical background is complete without reading about Florence Nightingale. I personally didn't know much about her, just that she was considered the founder of nursing, and that she was known as the Lady with the Lamp.

The book begins with a detailed genealogy of Flo's parents and their families... which seemed boring to me but does have relevance later in Flo's life. One of the major familial themes has to do with the inheritance law in Great Britain at the time - since women coul...more No nurse's historical background is complete without reading about Florence Nightingale. I personally didn't know much about her, just that she was considered the founder of nursing, and that she was known as the Lady with the Lamp.

The book begins with a detailed genealogy of Flo's parents and their families... which seemed boring to me but does have relevance later in Flo's life. One of the major familial themes has to do with the inheritance law in Great Britain at the time - since women could not own property in their own right, the ladies in the families were desparate to produce sons in order to preserve their own lifestyles. This sets the stage for Florence's mother's complete outrage when Florence refuses to marry. Florence had a sister, but no brothers, and so after the death of her father, her mother was out on her ear. Okay, not literally, but one of Flo's cousins inherited the family estate because Florence's mother could not legally inherit her husband's property.

Anyway, about the nursing stuff - it seems that Flo was always a very religious and very sensitive, guilt-ridden child. She decided quite early in childhood that she wanted to care for needy creatures, and took in countless pets. She also cared for her sister and her cousins (she was very close with many of her cousins) when they were ill, and seemed to take great pleasure in the act of caring. One theme that cropped up over and over in Flo's private writing was of her overwhelming guilt about some unnamed bad thing that she felt compelled to do over and over. I crassly interpreted that as masturbation, but the author believes that Florence had a deep tendency to daydream or fantasize, which took her away from the concerns of the material world, which caused her tremendous guilt.

Oh, right, the nursing stuff. Florence insisted on taking nurse's training, which caused her upperclass family no end of grief. At that time, nurses were either nuns (and the Nightingales were Protestant) or else they were "working girls" who were alleged to be drunken prostitutes and lousy patient advocates. Florence refused to back down and eventually her family gave in, reluctantly. After training, Florence immediately took on an activism role, advocating for sanitation, a healthy diet, and peaceful surrounding to help patients heal. During the Crimean War, British soldiers in Turkey were dying hand-over-fist, and with the help of her family's connection, Florence managed to get herself appointed to the hospital treating the wounded at Scutari. She loaded a ship with medical supplies that she convinced wealthy friends to donate, recruited a staff of women to train as nurses, and took off for Turkey. The Army's medical director was not impressed with Florence's demand that he give over operations of the hospital to her, but eventually changed his mind after she sat, mule-like, out on her boat in the harbor and refused to hand over the medical supplies.

Once she got inside the hospital, Florence insituted all kinds of changes. She insisted that each soldier needed his own bed with clean linens. She demanded that the dressings on the soldiers' wounds be changed regularly, and the wounds washed with soap and water and redressed with clean bandages. She insisted that the kitchen be sanitized, and that all the soldiers required a healthy diet to be able to heal. And most of all, she showed the wounded men that she cared, personally visiting each one of them. She got the name "The Lady of the Lamp" because she carried around a small lamp as she walked the wards at night visiting soldiers who couldn't sleep or needed comfort.

There's a lot more that Florence did to advance the profession of nursing. But since I'm not writing my own book on her, I'm going to stop there.
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Oct 22, 2009 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, british, victorian

I cannot tell you how suprised I am to have liked this as much as I did. Before picking up this book, I had little knowledge and less interest in the saintly nursing pioneer and got the book only because I had enjoyed another Victorian-era biography by the author, Gillian Gill (We Two: Victoria and Albert, Rules, Partners, Rivals). As it turns out, Nightingale is actually an incredibly fascinating figure--brilliant, highly cultured, moody, wildly charismatic, fiercely ambitious, and just crazy e...more

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Jul 21, 2011 Christina Dudley rated it 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book a lot! If you're into the 19th century, the Nightingales are so well-connected that this book reads like a who's who. In the family tree, you can even figure out how Helena Bonham Carter is related to Florence Nightingale! Gill paints a lively, sympathetic picture of the often dysfunctional family. Loved her pacing and touches of humor. Is it worse to be a living legend or the sister/father/mother/cousin/niece of a living legend? The scenes in the Crimea are not for the faint...more

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Jan 27, 2011 Marisa Adair rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this book after Gillian Gill's excellent "We Two" (the story of Victoria and Albert). And I was not disappointed. Gill mines a tremendous amount of correspondence to inform her writing, but the book is never dull. A wonderful biography of a woman who played such a major role in the development of our modern health care system, at a time when women were not encouraged to be leaders.

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Aug 23, 2010 Emma rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this while I was waiting for Gill's other book, We Two, to come to my library. Another really detailed account of life in the nineteenth century. I really enjoyed learning about the then-medical establishment's growth in terms of infectious disease treatments. Also the info about Florence Nightingale's big family said a lot about Victorian society.

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Feb 24, 2010 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club-books

Very interesting biography. Never knew much about her or her family, so it was great. Took a while to get through... her family's situations read like a Jane Austen novel! Enjoyed reading how she believed that God had called her to her work. The work she did at that time in history was extremely edgy. She was truly an early feminist (in a good way!)

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Jul 23, 2012 Deodand rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: africa, europe, non-fiction

I'm glad Gill made her approach from the angle of Nightingale's private life. We have enough bold-faced stories about her famous subject, now let's hear what was happening from Nightingale's own pen and the pens of those she loved.

Make no mistake, there is plenty of interesting material here. I was never interested in Nightingale as a biographical subject until I read some of Elizabeth Gaskell's work (she was Nightingale's contemporary). I found myself moved by what happened to Nightingale durin...more

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Jan 16, 2008 Christine rated it 4 of 5 stars

The best part of this book was the depth with which the author explored Nightingale's upbringing and family. It really brought together a complete picture of the woman and her life/mission. Florence Nightingale is way more than just "that famous nurse." She was really a person both of and ahead of her time, and if that sounds like a contradiction, Gillian Gill does an excellent job of illuminating just how it happened. My only complaint--the author really loves her thesaurus! I have a relatively...more

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Jun 22, 2010 Anna Andersen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Probably the thickest book i ever read... i loved this story because you learned of a wealthy family and how they lived and the small faith that grows within Florence and the simple love she has... being all alone through her life and how she deals with it.. was a good book that took me a while but glad i read it.

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Nov 30, 2010 Angela rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, of, medicine

This was a completely absorbing book not only giving insights into Florence Nightingale's character but also providing many interesting details about life and expectations in Victorian England.

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Mar 26, 2010 Whitney rated it 4 of 5 stars

Quite a compellingly-written book about not only the eccentric and formidable Florence Nightingale but her oftentimes conflicted but tightly-knit relationship with her family. Ms. Gill dissects Florence's family life and its impact on her development as thoughtfully as any careful researcher but throughout the book you can tell that in spite of Florence's very human deficiencies Gill honestly likes Florence -- and her family. She appreciates Florence's cutting wit, admires her implacable drive a...more

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Nov 20, 2011 Wendy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What a lovely insightful bio. Gill is a wonderful researcher but creates a readable work that is not dry. Loved it.

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Jun 27, 2011 Beni rated it 3 of 5 stars

It was slow and long but filled with history of the period and of the medical field. But slow and long. I did read it all!!!

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Oct 13, 2009 Susan Chin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Great book. Reads like a novel yet provides so much historical fiction, not only of "Flo" but of the entire Victorian Era.

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Dec 24, 2010 katen moore added it

Shelves: could-not-finish

Omg she was CRAZY. And i'm a nurse who takes my prof heritage seriously-- but flo was nuts

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Anna Why was she "nuts"? is being kind to soliders and working hours on ends making sure every man was comfortable crazy?? I have heard of way more crazy p...more
21 de Abr 09:39

katen moore she was amazing, yes, but she also appears from this biography to be difficult person to work with, I'm sure that this is likely related to the times,...more
21 de Abr 09:46

Anna No, no you didn't offended me. I was offending you, please forgive me. I always loved Flo so I wasn't being kind to you. Could we perhaps talk some mo...more
21 de Abr 15:40

Oct 13, 2012 Martha Tomhave rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

First rate biography of Florence Nightingale and her amazing family, all of whom were interesting - eccentrics, knew everyone, politically active - and the author is a figure in the story as well, as she shares her takes on the Nightingales. Gill has also written a great book on Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science. Intelligent, well written and rather quirky biographies are Gills' specialty. I highly recommend everything she has written. her books are quite long, but compelling - I re...more

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Aug 02, 2011 G. rated it 3 of 5 stars

Slow and overly detailed but a fascinating story

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Jan 19, 2010 Betsy rated it 5 of 5 stars

An excellent read about a fascinating person. Other reviews describe this book as a "novelistic biography," which I found to be true. It's very readable, and provides well-researched information as well as clearly identified interpretations or theories about Nightingale and her life. The abundant details about Nightingale and her family provide a strong sense for the person she really was--driven, competent, charismatic, conflicted, and complex. A highly recommended read.

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Sep 26, 2007 Weinz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Love loved it. I love WEN. For a Eurpean Victorian man, he went against what was expected and where society led him. He taught his daughters, not only taught them but thoroughly instructed them in law, Greek, Latin and extensive history. When society mores taught him to view his daughters as lesser humans he maintained their individualism and independence. He gave Florence a salary and let her live away from home. Unheard of at that time. FN was who she was because of him.

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May 14, 2008 Raelene marked it as to-read

Shelves: bookclub-picks, the-books-of-2008, memoirs-biography

It really was fascinating. Well, at least the first third was. I couldn't get through it, I just couldn't. And after not reading it for book club after a month and a half, after all my extensions at the library had worn out, I decided just to take it back and maybe try again another time. It really was a fascinating read, so well researched and incredibly well-written, just not real engrossing. Next time. Next time I'll pick it up and get through it. Next time.

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Oct 02, 2011 Trina rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: gave-up-on-it

I wish I could say I read this. I just couldn't do it. I thought it was a biography - it's not. The author clearly says so in the prologue. Despite that I decided to push forward. It is an abundance of information about the people in Nightingales life, her family. Included are some peripheral members of the family as well as some significant friends. ... if you think my review is boring...

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Feb 08, 2010 Lisa Hayes rated it 4 of 5 stars

About 150 pages in and it's really holding my interest.

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Aug 23, 2008 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

I didn't know very much about Florence Nightingale before reading this book and she did remarkable things! The book is very "wordy" and goes into so much detail that it was hard to get through. More like someone's thesis than a gripping life story. But I have a great appreciation for the lady!

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Nov 21, 2012 Susan Zinner rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

'Read this as background for a journal article on moral exemplars; interesting story of a woman who was ahead of her time in many ways. This is an fascinating look at the age of Victoria and a woman who changed ideas about what a woman could and should do with her life...

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Jun 20, 2009 Megan rated it 5 of 5 stars

This isn't the exact book, I read, because they don't have the one I read in this program. I was awed with the work conditions and terrible things that this nurse saw and dealt with. I admire her courage and love and her endless service!

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About Gillian Gill

Gillian Gill, who holds a PhD in modern French literature from Cambridge University, has taught at Northeastern, Wellesley, Yale, and Harvard. She is the author of Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale, Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries, and Mary Baker Eddy. She lives in suburban Boston.

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