Florence Nightingale : 1820-1910.

  • Cecil Woodham-Smith
Date:
1951
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Florence Nightingale : 1820-1910. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material is part of the Elmer Belt Florence Nightingale collection. The original may be consulted at University of California Libraries.

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    we may lay aside all care for our own happiness . . . because it is of so much consequence to another) gives that leisure frame to our mind, which opens it at once to joy. Her destiny may have demanded that marriage should be put behind her, but the desire to be loved died hard. She could not rid her heart of longing for a love so great that we may lay aside all care for our own happiness . . . because it is of so much consequence to another. Nor could she bring herself to face losing Richard Monckton Milnes. Month after month she temporized, evading the moment when she must give him a definite answer. Fanny passed from impatience to anger, accusing her of godless ingratitude, perversity, and conceit. At this point Florence found consolation in a new friend. The previous autumn, through Clarkey, she had met Selina Bracebridge, wife of Charles Holte Bracebridge, of Atherstone Hall, near Coventry. SeUna understood her. In a retrospect Miss Nightingale wrote: She never told me life was fair and my share of its blessings great and that I ought to be happy. She did not know that I was miserable but she felt it; and to me, young, strong and blooming as I then was, to me, the idol of the man I adored, the spoilt child of fortune, she had the heart and the instinct to say—'Earth, my child, has a grave and in heaven there is rest.' Selina and her husband became family friends, and she was given a pet name by the Nightingales, the Greek character sigma—2—partly in com- pliment to the Hellenic traits of her character, partly in reference to her love for Greece. Through the spring of 1847 Florence had a new dream. She imagined 2 was always with her, always waiting for her, beautiful, kind, and loving. She wrote imaginary dialogues in which she put down 2's part in the conversation as well as her own. The dialogues were never sent; they were too private to be read even by 2. She feared again for her mental balance. All round her she could see the effects of enforced idleness and frustration—I see so many of my kind who have gone mad for want of something to do. People who might have been so happy. Aunt Evans, Aunt Patty, she wrote. Would she wake up one day to find she was elderly and mad and subject, like Aunt Patty, to outbursts.' In the autumn of 1847 she broke down completely. She wrote to Clarkey that she could not face the prospect of three winter months of perpetual row. She collapsed, took to her bed, coughed. She was rescued by the Bracebridges, who were going to spend the winter in Rome; 2 persuaded Fanny to let them take Florence. The fuss was enormous: the clothes she was to take, the books she was to read, the sights she was to see, were separately the subject of consideration, I