QI The Book of the Dead

thirties but, on the advice of her learned male friends, never published. At various times a novel, a philosophical dialogue between two sisters and a heartfelt polemic, it is the mostcomplete statement of her belief that only work make would sense of her life. It is one of the great feminist texts of the nineteenth century, intellectually and emotionally intelligent but so raw that later writers found hard it to swallow. Virginia Woolf acknowledged its influence but thought it ‘a shriek of nervous agony’.
    The more of Florence Nightingale’s work one reads, the more one senses that, had she been born a man, she might have become a great moral philosopher like John Stuart Mill or a respected historian like Thomas Carlyle (both of whom admired her writing). Instead, she grew up in a household where men idly theorised and women wasted their lives ‘looking at prints, doing worsted work and reading little books’. Acutely conscious as a child of the suffering of the Victorian poor, from the age of six she set her mind on ‘a profession, a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties’. Only this could liberate her ‘from the accumulation of nervous energy which has had nothing to do during the day’ and which makes women feel ‘every night, when they go to bed, as if they are going mad’.
    At the age of sixteen Florence had a religious experience in which ‘God had called her to his service’. This didn’t mean fiddling around doing charity work at her local church: it meant using her hands and brain to right the wrongs of the world. She asked her parents if they would support her intention to go into nursing. They were horrified and refused. In fact, her mother Fanny fainted at the shock of what her youngest daughter was suggesting. ‘We are ducks,’ she later lamented ‘who have hatched a wild swan.’ So Florence continued to live at home and tried to escape the glacial atmosphere in the house by plunging herself into a study of mysticism. Over the next decade, she would develop her own theology, which she outlined in another bookthat was destined to remain unpublished, Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth among the Artizans of England . Her studies took her far beyond the shores of Christianity – one wonders how many other English women in the 1850s would ever conceive of writing to a friend: ‘You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.’ At the same time, she dutifully fulfilled her social obligations and entertained a string of enthusiastic suitors.
    Her most persistent male admirer was Richard Monckton Milnes, a literary patron and minor poet, who was also the MP for Pontefract. He was a good friend of Tennyson’s, the first biographer of John Keats, and the man who introduced the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Britain. On the face of it, he was the perfect match for Florence: clever, well connected and wealthy. He obviously thought himself the right man for the job: he patiently paid court to her for nine years. She was also clearly tempted by him:
    I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. Sometimes I think I will satisfy my passional nature at all events, because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him in combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things .
     
    By early 1849 Mr Monckton Milnes decided he needed a definiteanswer. She said no. Her parents were furious and Florence tortured herself with remorse:
    I know that if I were to see him again … the very thought of doing so quite overcomes me. I know that since I refused him not one day has passed without my thinking of him, that life is desolate without his sympathy .
     
    By the end of the year, she was in a state of near mental collapse and friends of the family offered to take her on a trip through Greece and Egypt. 1850 was her thirtieth year and she was determined to make it a turning point:
    To-day I am 30 — the age Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things. No