Flight of the Wild Swan
This powerful biographical novel of Florence Nightingale starts with Florence, an upper-class child in Victorian England, being called by her governess “a little monster.” She wonders if, in fact, she is a monster.
The first half of the novel relates the difficulties Florence has as a child and young woman, being very different from other young women and unwilling to conceal that. From her first experience of a hare, injured in a trap and dying in her arms, she is absorbed by the idea of helping the sick and injured and comforting the dying. This is considered most unsuitable; she spends the first thirty years of her life fighting that prejudice.
Finally, after training in Europe, Florence is able to start reforming hospitals in London. She moves on from that to her best-known work in the military hospitals during the Crimean War. She returns from there with the love and respect of all the military men and indeed the entire community, but with her health broken.
This is a fascinating novel, unusual in its brief but extremely telling chapters. Florence struggles for decades against the ideas and prejudices of her time, starting with her sister and progressing to the petty bureaucrats she had to battle to provide food and bedding for ‘her boys’ in war. With sharp, uncompromising clarity, we are shown how, helped by a small number of staunch supporters, Florence fights to bring the basics of comfort and humanity to the filth and disorganization of the military hospitals.
The author spares us no anguishing detail of an uncaring society ignoring the suffering in squalid circumstances not only of thousands of soldiers, but also the poor in British cities of the time. This is a significant tribute to the strength of the woman who changed that.
