Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon (review)

Roughly two-thirds of the way through Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon, biographer Mark Bostridge summarizes a shift in the attitude of some family members toward their once-revered and idolized relative this way: "According to Aunt Mai, those who spent prolonged periods of time with Florence felt forced continually to weigh up what she said, and to distinguish what was exaggerated, and what entirely fanciful" (384). Readers of the many biographies of Nightingale that have appeared since her death in 1910 might be said to face the same predicament, grappling as they must with a figure as likely to be depicted as saint or sinner, as protofeminist or enemy to her sex.

Was Nightingale the imperious hypocrite infamously mocked by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians (1918) or was she instead the preeminent example of the earnest Victorian? While Bostridge has made it a goal in his carefully researched and delightfully readable biography to expose as distortions both extremes, his subtitle signals the real impetus of his project. "Part Five: Icon" constitutes a mere twenty-three pages of the biography's end, but the construction of Nightingale—a complex combination of her own self-fashioning and the responses of her family, friends, and coworkers—begins early, almost with her 1820 birth into the Nightingale clan.

As is well known, Nightingale scorned "the prison which is called a family" (qtd. in Bostridge 373). Bostridge, however, paints a much more nuanced and somewhat kaleidoscopic picture of her relationship over time with her mother, Fanny, and her sister Parthenope, one that complicates the longstanding association of these two in particular with Nightingale's pronounced sense of the family as excessively conventional, tyrannical, and repressive. Her relationship to her father, "Pop," is equally fascinating. As Bostridge summarizes, "There can be no doubt that Florence Nightingale loved her father with an intensity unmatched by her feelings for any other individual. Even in old age, she would look back and long for his caress. As time wore on, however, that love would be tempered by disappointment, loss of respect—and latterly by a degree of contempt" (45). Readers of this work will welcome and derive much from Bostridge's careful attention to the "complicated network of uncles, 'multitudinous aunts' and the 'great clan of cousins'" that played an important role throughout Nightingale's life (Nightingale qtd. in Bostridge 29). Especially interesting are her relationships with those Nightingale characterized as kindred spirits—a disposition she brought with her to certain relationships outside the family circle as well. Her father was one such kindred spirit, but so too was her aunt, Mai Shore. Little details, like the fact that Nightingale referred to her aunt Julia Smith as "Stormy Ju" (clearly a case of the pot calling the kettle black), add to the texture of Bostridge's sustained discussion of Nightingale's family relationships.

Every Nightingale biographer must be equally concerned, of course, with her fraught identity as the Lady with the Lamp. Although Bostridge acknowledges the silliness of attempting to locate the seeds of greatness in a distinguished figure's childhood, he nevertheless attends dutifully to the various accounts of Nightingale's early interest in health and healthcare, noting the times she nursed sick dolls or cared for injured animals and observing that "from about the age of nine she made a habit of noting down details of the condition of individuals who were ill or in need of care" (48). Her nursing career, begun at the Deaconess Institution at Kaiserswerth, is framed, as it should be, by extensive discussion of the religious beliefs that would play such an important role in Nightingale's life. Bostridge usefully distinguishes between the rationalistic perspective and analytical mind that shaped Nightingale's longstanding search for "divine law" in everyday life and the workings of the universe (51), and her more personal, often intensely emotional search for evidence of God within. Like so many Victorians, Nightingale was at best a nominal Anglican, and...