QI The Book of the Dead

more love. No more marriage. Now Lord let me think only of Thy Will, what Thou willest me to do .
     
    But her diary of the year is anything but a peaceful acceptance of God’s will. She was obviously still being assailed by ‘the evil of dreaming’:
    March 15: God has delivered me from the greatest offence and the constant murder of all my thoughts.
March 21: Left the boat ringing our hands. Such a delicious hour in the gardens of Heliopolis – where Plato walked and Moses prayed. Undisturbed by my great enemy.
June 7: But this long moral death, this failure of all attempts to cure. I think I have never been so bad as this last week.
June 12: To Megara! Alas it matters little where I go – sold as I am to the enemy –Whether in London or Athens, it is all alike to me.
June 17: After a sleepless night physically and morally ill andbroken down, a slave – glad to leave Athens. I have no wish on earth but sleep.
June 18: I had no wish, no enemy, I longed but for sleep. My enemy is too strong for me, everything has been tried. All, all is vain.
June 21: Two delightful days at Corfu. My enemy let me go. I lived again, in both body and mind. Oh! today, how lovely it was, how poetic – and I was free
June 29: Four long days of absolute slavery.
June 30: I cannot write a letter, can do nothing.
July 1: I lay in bed at night and called upon God to save me. My soul spoke to His & I was comforted.
     
    These enigmatic entries read very like the tortured spiritual travails of the Christian mystics she had studied: St Teresa of Avila or St John of the Cross. Like them, she often refers to God as her ‘husband’. There is more here than just religious ecstasy. No one can be fully sure what the ‘dreaming’ that so disturbed her at night was, but it seems most likely to have been sexual fantasy, possibly even masturbation. In rejecting Milnes, she was rejecting marriage itself, and, by extension, sex. She makes it plain that she was physically attracted to Milnes and we will never know what passed between them privately. He was certainly not a sexual innocent: after he died it was revealed that he had one of the largest collections of erotic literature ever assembled, with a particular fondness for the works of the Marquis de Sade. Her embrace of mysticism, of marriage with God, may well have offered her a way of sublimating some of this energy. But by the end of the year, she was convinced that the solution to her ‘dreaming’ was to keep her hands and her mind busy.

    In 1851 she went to Kaiserswerth Hospital in Germany to take a basic three-month course in nursing with the Institute for Protestant Deaconesses. This was a revelation to her: ‘The nursing there was nil, the hygiene horrible,’ she later wrote, ‘… But never have I met with a higher tone, a purer devotion than there. There was no neglect.’ She followed this with a stint with the Sisters of Mercy near Paris, but on her return home, plunged into another depression in which she hardly ever stirred from her bed. The family doctor persuaded her parents that moving her out of the house would be good for Florence’s ‘nerves’ and in 1853 she was appointed superintendent of the Institution for Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances at Harley Street in London. An outbreak of cholera in nearby Soho allowed her to demonstrate for the first time her flair for administration and unflappability under pressure as she helped local hospitals manage the huge flood of patients.
    Towards the end of 1853 Britain became embroiled in the Crimea, siding with France to support Turkey against Russia. Newspaper reports alerted the British public to the poor standards of care given to the troops evacuated from the Crimean peninsula to Scutari in Turkey. Sidney Herbert, a close friend of Florence’s, was appointed Secretary of State for War and asked her if she would lead a party of British nurses to the war zone. In November 1854 she arrived at the Barrack Hospital with thirty-eight nurses and proceeded to re-organise it from top to bottom. Fresh air, cleanliness, good diet and exercise were her principles, and in the midst of the chaos and the stench, her nurses were impeccably turned out and records were kept with a military precision. Florence led from the front, covering four miles each evening walking through the wards, helping injured soldiers to write lettershome and checking on their welfare. Although she was always more of a nursing theoretician than