A Bestiary of Florence Nightingales: Strachey and Collective Biographies of Women

Loại tài liệu:

Article

Tác giả:

Booth, Alison

Đề mục:

British & Irish literature

Nhà xuất bản:

Indiana University Press

Ngày xuất bản:

Spring 2018

Định dạng:

pdf

Nguồn gốc:

Victorian studies, Volume 60, Number 1, Sping 2018, pp. 93-99

Ngôn ngữ:

eng

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Nội dung

Like many biographies of women, Nightingale's relies on the anecdote of childhood promise, specifically, her preternatural skill in repairing a dog or a doll.5 It may seem far-fetched to place the literary landmark Eminent Victorians alongside Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.6 Yet Strachey and later commentators uneasily dismiss the traces of popular Nightingales that surface in Eminent Victorians, a highbrow version of collective biography. On the contrary, Strachey asserts that "a Demon possessed her" (97). [...]she was more interesting and less agreeable than the legend.7 Strachey essentially makes such claims for all four sexually repressed, indomitable characters, as if he is rescuing his subjects from their portrayals in self-help books, children's stories, or family-sponsored hagiography. [...]when Strachey calls Nightingale "the founder of modern nursing" (130), he explains the low status of her chosen career with this standard Dickensian reference: "a 'nurse' meant then a coarse old woman, always ignorant, usually dirty, often brutal, a Mrs. Gamp, in bunched-up sordid garments, tippling at the brandy bottle or indulging in worse irregularities" (Strachey 99). Relative stature can be measured by tables of contents in CBW; thus, Joan of Arc, the most frequent subject, appears in sixty-eight books; Queen Victoria and Nightingale, each in sixty-one, well ahead of many queens or biblical women (Mary Queen of Scots, forty-seven; Deborah, forty-two).

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A Bestiary of Florence Nightingales: Strachey and Collective Biographies of Women

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