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.
HM
was one of the first to be aware of the movement towards regulating prostitution in Britain by means of instituting in military districts the arrest and medical examination for syphilis of women who were...
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.
qtd. in
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...
Reception
Frances Power Cobbe
FPC
's importance to her contemporaries is most readily recalled today by the fact that Matthew Arnold
thought her a worthy target of his corrective wisdom in The Function of Criticism at the Present Time...
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...
Reception
Catherine Marsh
Her father's biography was well-received, particularly because he was a widely-known and respected man. It incorporated an excerpt of a review from The Guardian, which complimented the portrait as a vehicle for emotion, stating...
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, 1988.
Her letter-writers range from such prominent figures as Frances, Lady Nelson
, and Florence Nightingale
(two women whose connections with warfare by sea and land were unusual to say the least), to ordinary women, most...
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...
Textual Features
Josephine Tey
Several are based on historical or biblical material. The title play, named after a district of Edinburgh, features the actual Duncan Forbes
, a local Whig who was remembered for showing compassion and clemency to...
Textual Features
Sarah Josepha Hale
Editorial policy was to avoid anything controversial in mainstream politics. The magazine never mentioned the Civil War during the course of the conflict. In contrast to the Ladies' Magazine, the new one had a...
Textual Features
Mary Stott
Here MS
writes grippingly of her own life, and illuminatingly about myriad subjects of public or cultural interest: the lives, customs, and deaths of newspapers, the conspiracy of silence about sex which had not dissipated...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Gaskell
The issue of female employment is as important to this text as its better-known concern with sexual transgression, since Ruth is a redundant woman with few options open to her. In fact, her infusion of...
Textual Features
Anna Brownell Jameson
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...
