Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel.(Review)

Florence Nightingale's reputation was on something of a roller-coaster for much of last century, as Florence Nightingale: Avenging Angel, by Hugh Small (London: Constable, 1999; pp. xii+221. Pb. 9.99 [pounds sterling]), shows. When she died in 1910, at the age of ninety, after more than half a lifetime of seclusion, most people were surprised to discover that she was still alive, though they retained an impression of her from the dim and distant past as the heroine of the Crimean War. Eight years later, she was one of the Eminent Victorians held up to exposure by Lytton Strachey. Far from being the saintly and self-sacrificing maiden of national legend, Strachey portrayed …