Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing as Survival Memoir

Florence Nightingale’s nineteenth-century best seller, Notes on Nursing, does not lend itself easily to an autobiographical reading. As my English students observed unenthusiastically upon reading it, this is a dry (boring was their word) instruction book. Its meaning—what nursing is and what it is not—is transparent, even repetitive, on a first reading and, although Nightingale does offer up occasional anecdotes from her own life, the book’s focus throughout remains, quite appropriately, on nursing rather than on the fascinating subject of Nightingale herself. However, just as recent poststructuralist theory has questioned our traditional concept of the author, ¹ it has at the same time, and paradoxically, allowed us to discover the construction of an author in genres previously considered quite distinct from autobiography. ² Through such a lens, Notes on Nursing looks to be as much an impassioned personal survival memoir of a complex woman as a plain-speaking nursing guide. Embedded within Nightingale’s hints on nursing is a personal drama of crisis and survival.

With the exception of Mary Poovey’s ground-breaking piece on Notes on Nursing, little attention has been given to anything but the historical significance of Nightingale’s text. ³ When originally published in 1859, Notes on Nursing sold an astounding 15,000 copies in one month. Written “to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others”—in other words, for “every woman, or at least almost every woman, in England”—Nightingale’s book not only found its way into many Victorian homes but also, despite its intended amateur audience, contributed to the foundations of the nursing system as we now know it. ⁴ In fact, Notes on Nursing is still canonical reading for nursing students, and the myth of Nightingale as the savior of the profession continues unabated despite prolonged attempts to rehumanize it. ⁵

In recent years, feminist critics have brought renewed attention to Nightingale, mostly through analyses of her essay Cassandra, which reveals a much more complex and self-consciously ambitious woman than the later, idealized image of Nightingale would suggest. ⁶ In Cassandra, Nightingale invokes the tragic heroine of Greek myth to comment upon the condition of nineteenth-century women. As the ancient Greek prophet was doomed by Apollo to speak her truths to a disbelieving audience, so too Nightingale’s Victorian Cassandra struggles unsuccessfully to be heard. This Cassandra encounters a society that thoroughly undermines her public authority on the basis of her gender. Cassandra is both a startlingly insightful feminist treatise and a barely veiled autobiography, for Nightingale referred to herself more than once in her letters and diaries as “poor Cassandra.”

Nightingale’s early adulthood and the autobiographical insights that Cassandra offers into the highly intelligent and ambitious, yet socially repressed Nightingale of 1852 provide a necessary context for the authoritative survivor revealed in Notes on Nursing seven years later. The Nightingale of 1852, like her heroine Cassandra, had truths to tell, but no audience to hear them. She viewed her family as the primary oppressive force against which, in early life, she was forced to contend in order to develop a full sense of selfhood. Nightingale complains in a long, private note of the nineteenth-century woman’s overwhelming obligations to her family: “There is absolutely no God, no country, no duty to [women] at all except family. . . . I know nothing like the petty grinding tyranny of a good English family.” ⁷

By the time Nightingale reached adolescence, her family had already developed alliances that pitted Florence, along with her father, against her mother and sister, Parthe. ⁸ Both mother and sister gave themselves over to the social conventions and drawing room rituals of a monied and propertied Whig family, while Florence and her father communed together in the library. William Nightingale’s devotion to Florence’s education produced an extraordinarily literate nineteenth-century woman. He personally trained her in rhetoric, mathematics, classical and European history and languages, politics, and religion—academic fields traditionally limited to men. But when, in early adulthood, Florence briefly studied nursing on the continent at...