We all know about Florence Nightingale's great works, but here Gill (biographer of Mary Baker Eddy and Agatha Christie) explores what they cost her and her family personally. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The Crimean War's beloved "Lady With the Lamp" appears as the magnetic center of this multi-generational family saga filled with public achievement and private love-hate relationships. As a pioneer of reform and greater autonomy for women, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) drew inspiration from the sprawling Nightingale/Shore/Smith clan of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Her grandfather, William Smith, successfully battled in Parliament to abolish slavery. Her father, William Edward Nightingale (nicknamed WEN), educated Florence and older sister Parthenope himself. Fanny, WEN's wife, created an indispensable social network among the rich and powerful with a steady stream of parties. Under these influences, Florence grew into a brilliant, vibrant, yet moody woman. Especially unsettling, she rejected a suitor in favor of a celibate lifestyle that would allow her to pursue her calling as a nurse. Parthenope, a chronic invalid throughout much of her adult life, fell into such hysteria over her sister's decision that she almost wrecked the family. Despite volumes of Nightingale family correspondence, significant aspects of Florence's life remain enigmatic, including her reclusiveness following a debilitating illness in 1857. Gill, author of several scholarly books on women's lives, is careful not to push far beyond this massive documentary evidence; she dismisses, for instance, speculation that Nightingale was a lesbian. The leisurely paced narrative occasionally bogs down in extraneous detail, but it masterfully illuminates crucial background elements, including the family's Unitarian tradition of political radicalism and the inheritance laws that made suitable matrimonial matches a necessity for the Nightingale girls. In contrast to Lytton Strachey's acid portrait of in Eminent Victorians, Gill notes Nightingale's faults (e.g., self-pity and a tendency to suck the life out of those who aided her) without losing sight of her intelligence, energy, compassion, and courage in taking on the male army medical establishment in the Crimean War. An incisive examination of one loving but divided family's grappling with power, privilege, passion, and philanthropy in Victorian Britain. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

What Florence Nightingale--the legendary Lady with the Lamp--did for the wounded and suffering British soldiers in Crimea has long secured her place in the history books. But what she did within the circle of her own family has remained largely hidden from view. Until now. Informing careful scholarship with imaginative insight, a distinguished biographer brings to life the entire gifted but perplexing Nightingale family. Unlike biographers deafened by the acclaim for Florence's courageous medical crusade in the military hospitals of Scutari, Gill can still hear the quiet but vexed voice of a father who instilled iconoclastic bravery in his daughter only to recoil in dismay when that bravery steeled her against a favorable marriage so that she could pursue her luminous ambitions. Similarly, while other biographers focus on how Florence advanced unprecedented reforms in military sanitation and medical care by deftly orchestrating two royal commissions, Gill probes the ways that Florence's descent into invalidism during the commission years strained her already difficult relations with her sister and mother. To be sure, readers will learn much from Gill about how Florence pursued her epoch-making objectives on the broad Victorian stage--waging fierce bureaucratic warfare against obstructionists in the War Office, drafting key parliamentary speeches for sympathetic cabinet ministers. But because they can turn elsewhere for analyses of her public life, readers will appreciate this book most for its novel perspective on Florence's alternately tender and irksome dealings with her own kin. --Bryce Christensen Copyright 2004 Booklist

Not just another biography, this is a book about Nightingale and her place in an extended family. It emphasizes just how confining the lives of most women were in her time and what Nightingale did to break through female stereotypes, even though this process often resulted in considerable estrangement from her family. Still, her family supported her, and in fact she could not have accomplished what she did without economic support from her father, who somewhat neglected his other daughter to provide it. So all-consuming were Nightingale's causes that she tried to ration visits by family members and limit the topics they could discuss so that she would not be distracted from her work. Nevertheless, when her mother was confined to bed, Florence took it as her duty to serve as her nurse and spent most of 1872 taking care of her. Even when others stepped in, and even when her mother no longer recognized her, she continued to keep informed of her mother's needs and conditions. In short, this well-written, heavily documented, and extremely readable book offers a different picture of Nightingale; it makes a significant contribution to a better understanding of this powerful woman who brought about radical changes. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels. V. L. Bullough emeritus, California State University, Northridge

To focus on the well-nigh unknown family members of an icon is an audacious step for a biographer. And Gill's Nightingales does dwell in some measure on Florence's sickly, gentle sister, Parthenope ("Pop"); her stern, loving, society-minded mother, Fanny; her intellectually enterprising dilettante father, William Edward (amusingly referred to as "WEN" throughout). But never for a moment does the true focus ever seriously threaten to abandon the endlessly fascinating "Flo." No, the true leap here is Gill's steadfast intentness on placing Nightingale in her full context, both familial and societal (which ceaselessly overlap) and her brazenly intimate approach to storytelling. We hear a great deal about Nightingale's family members, both nuclear and extended, an intelligent and industrious upper-class British family that didn't quite know what to do with this delightful tornado of a woman. Equally intelligent and driven (and, unsurprisingly, guilt plagued), Nightingale early on was given a strong dose of true intellectual freedom by her father and ever after chafed at the role life expected of her as dutiful wife and mother. Reflexively obeying her holy visions, she instead foreswore sex of any kind and threw herself into nursing and health-care reform, much to the embarrassment of her immediate family-and to the gratitude of the generations of emancipated women to follow. The book is expansive, richly detailed, generous to a fault; Gill's skills may well set a new standard for the novelistic mode of biography. She attends scrupulously to the voluminous paper trail Flo left behind and frequently introduces her "I" to speculate, conjecture, argue, scold. Fortunately, Gill's knowledge of the era is so profound, her judgment so sound, and her narrative voice so cozy that it transforms this saint's life into an enveloping treat that serious readers will delight in plumbing. Photos not seen by PW. 50,000 first printing. Agent, Jill Kneering. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved