The Personal in the Public: Autobiographical Strains in the Writings of Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale is best known as “the Lady with the Lamp,” the sympathetic figure providing succor to the sick and wounded of the Crimea, whose efforts helped legitimize nursing as a career for women. In the almost sixty years of her post-Crimean life, however, she was a fierce social reformer and cultural critic, whose works ranged from sanitation reform to feminist treatises. But while ostensibly “objective,” several of these pieces are seamed with thinly veiled autobiographical elements, which reveal the conflict and tension inherent in Victorian domestic ideology. In this paper I will look at the effect of these autobiographical intrusions in three of her works, specifically Suggestions for Thought, Cassandra, and Notes on Nursing. Nightingale was a fierce proponent of women’s need for extra-domestic employment, but at the same time framed that need in terms of the dominant culture, filtered, often unconsciously, through the lens of her own experiences, particularly those with her family. Focusing on these personal eruptions into her public works, I will examine the instabilities that are revealed between the public and the private, the feminine and the masculine realms. The resulting inconsistencies not only reveal Nightingale’s own contradictory impulses, but the contradictions inherent in a culture wrestling with shifting ideological constructs.
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