This book tells the story of Florence Nightingale's life and work by providing the background of her family and social circle. While she was from a rather progressive family for the Victorian era, she also had to deal with old-fashioned concepts like entails. The author uses the large corpus of extant family letters to draw a vivid picture of the thoughts, feelings and personalities of everyone involved.
It was all very interesting. Her parents took the time and effort to educate her in an era where general education for women was just beginning, and she took up nursing because she felt she had been sent by God. Although Nightingale could be quite the social butterfly when she put her mind to it, I think she was inherently an introvert and, after living in close quarters with all the other nurses in Crimea, she became a recluse and spent the last several decades of her life at home, living as an invalid with a disease that had not yet been diagnosed, but still working to develop a public health system in Great Britain.
The book is thick (~500 pages) and, because it is an academic biography, slow reading, but it's all terribly interesting and paints a vivid portrait of upper middle class Victorian life. Reading about how hard Florence Nightingale had to work - both in the Crimea and in the crazy social life that her parents organized, temporarily inpsired me to work harder myself.
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