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.
She produced the book after a meeting with Davis in 1856 that took place under circumstances which led the writer to appreciate more fully the extraordinary character and history of Elizabeth Davis.
qtd. in
Beddoe, Deirdre et al. “Introduction”. The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis, Honno, 1987, p. ix - xix.
ix
The book...
Textual Production
Mary Angela Dickens
Taylor worked as a nurse alongside Florence Nightingale
in the Crimean War before converting to Catholicism
and establishing her Congregation
. She published a novel about historical persecution of English Catholics as well as an...
Textual Production
Lilian Bowes Lyon
LBL
's work has been reprinted in The World Split Open, 1984, edited by Louise Bernikow
; it has been discussed by Margaret Willy
(in Essays and Studies, 1952), and Anne Treneer
(in...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Eliza Lynn Linton
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,
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...