Florence Nightingale

Mark Bostridge

Hardcover, $35

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

October 2008

672 pages

Last month my roommate and I watched a fairly awful made-for-TV-movie called Florence Nightingale starring one Jaclyn Smith.  The film ended abruptly as Florence’s time in the Crimea was coming to a close, and since I knew that she had lived to be 90, I was curious about the rest of her life.  Thus, this giant tome entered my life.

As a biographer, Mark Bostridge is sympathetic without losing a grasp on the truth.  But as a writer, he ought to have more sympathy for his readers!  As many, many biographers have discovered over the years, FN left behind a plethora of diaries, letters, notes, and manuscripts.  There is scarcely a thought that entered her head or a belief in her heart that did not make it to paper.  As an historian, I can understand the excitement of finding such a treasure trove of information, but a writer needs to be able to step back and say “This factoid doesn’t actually matter.”  Bostridge’s book is littered with dates, names, facts, and quotations that don’t really give us a clearer picture of who Florence Nightingale was–they just clutter up the information readers are looking for.

However, if you can skim judiciously I highly recommend this biography, as it paints a balanced picture of Florence, flaws and all.  It is a terrible  irony that as one of the most biographed women in history, she remains one of the least understood.  Bostridge certainly moves beyond the Lady with the Lamp myth to discover the real person underneath.  The last third of the book is repetitious beyond belief, but stick with it and you’ll be rewarded with a great understanding of a great woman.