Florence Nightingale.

  • Lytton Strachey
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Florence Nightingale. 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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    travel, kind friends, everything. My God! What is to become of me? A desirable young man? Dust and ashes! What was there desirable in such a thing as that? In my thirty-first year, she noted in her diary, *'I see nothing desirable but death. Three more years passed, and then at last the pressure of time told; her family seemed to realise that she was old enough and strong enough to have her way; and she became the superintendent of a charitable nursing home in Harley Street. She had gained her independence, though it was in a meagre sphere enough; and her mother was still not quite resigned: surely Florence might at least spend the summer in the country. At times, indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept. We are ducks, she said with tears in her eyes, who have hatched a wild swan. But the poor lady was wrong; it was not a swan that they had hatched; it was an eagle.
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