Florence Nightingale's books at bedtime

I can never get over quite how well connected Florence Nightingale was. Pluck any notable Victorian out of your memory, and Florence Nightingale will definitely have read them, dined with them, written to them, castigated them or influenced them.

She was inspired by the Brontes - Charlottes novels and Emily’s poetry in particular. Jane Eyre, that epitomy of trapped and rebellious womanhood, struck a deep chord in Florence. And a close friend of Florence’s, Richard Monckton-Milnes, declined an invitation from Thackeray to meet Charlotte Bronte at a dinner.

Mrs Gaskell, Bronte’s biographer, was also at one time a friend of Nightingale’s, though Mrs Gaskell famously found Nightingale a little chilling in the end: ‘She is, I think, too much for institutions, sisterhoods and associations…’ though Gaskell was prescient enough to realise Nightingale’s power and her ‘utter unselfishness in serving’…

Nightingale visited Marian Evans (before she became George Eliot), and acclaimed Middlemarch in 1873 (though she had no patience with Dorothea’s choice of husbands.) Given that Florence never acknowledged her own cousin Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon, who was born out of wedlock, she cannot have approve of Eliot’s lifestyle.

She thought Jane Austen ‘not striking’, and would undoubtedly have read Dickens voraciously, especially Martin Chuzzlewit, which features the world’s worse nurse, Mrs Gamp, and was published between 1842 - 1844, just a decade before the Crimean War.

If you want to know more about her reading, and are after a long read in this strange limbo of ours, I do recommend Mark Bostridge’s wonderful biography of Nightingale.

And if you love audiobooks George Eliot’s Silas Marner, on BBC Sounds, is a rare and luxuriously unabridged delight.