Nightingales : the story of Florence Nightingale and her remarkable family / Gillian Gill.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Florence Nightingale is history's most famous nurse, the epitome of nurturing femininity. But behind the image of 'The Lady With the Lamp' was a brilliant, combative, complicated woman, struggling to escape a web of social prejudice and familial expectations." "From girlhood, Florence wanted to dedicate her life to nursing in public hospitals, even though nursing was then work done only by women of the lower classes. Florence's family - her father WEN, her mother Fanny, her elder sister Parthenope - were determined to stop her. The Nightingales were a rich, cultured, liberal Victorian family, part of England's social elite. Their friends included Lord Palmerston, Lord Shaftesbury, Elizabeth Gaskell the novelist, and the young mathematician Ada Byron Lovelace. Florence's family counted on her to make a brilliant match, and bitter fights broke out when she refused the eminently suitable Richard Monckton Milnes." "Radical in her ideas, eccentric in her way of life, Florence was often at war with her family, but love and loyalty always triumphed in the end. The other three Nightingales adored and criticised her, supported and thwarted her, defined and were defined by her." "Nightingales sheds new light not just on one of the Victorian period's most influential figures, but also on the entire era through which Florence and her family lived."--BOOK JACKET.