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Sioban Nelson, Paul Crawford, Anna Greenwood, Richard Bates, Jonathan Memel, Florence Nightingale at Home, Social History of Medicine, Volume 35, Issue 3, August 2022, Pages 1030–1031, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkab032
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Florence Nightingale at Home is a multi-authored text produced by an interdisciplinary team of scholars. It takes a fresh look at Nightingale from the perspective of Victorian notions of home. The authors ambitiously aim to offer a ‘new understanding’ of Nightingale based upon her formative domestic experiences and trace those influences through her life and work. It proposes the theoretical and historical context for this approach as the ascendency of the ideology of domesticity as cultural moment in Victorian England.
Part of the pleasure in reading this thoughtful and well-executed collaborative work is the way in which the received narrative boundaries have been dissolved. Radically, the text reassembles Nightingale in a way that decentres the all-too-familiar narrative which places Crimea and the nursing training school at St Thomas’s as the centrepieces of her life. The effect is impressive as unexpected elements come to the fore and reveal the workings of Victorian society rather than the dazzling and complex woman that usually commands the stage alone. As for Nightingale herself, the narrative structure permits her escape from what must surely be the burdensome dominion of her ‘foundress of nursing’ fame, allowing other preoccupations, successes and failures to see the light of day. The conceit of the home and the domestic works extremely well. I was prepared to see some stretching of the argument in order to cover the gamut of Nightingale’s life and work, but ended each chapter impressed both with the persuasiveness of the argument and a sense of novelty as the approach worked to bring into sharp relief aspects of Victorian society that revealed much about Nightingale, and aspects of Nightingale’s life and works that revealed much about the Victorians.
