Flight of the Wild Swan
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A majestic novel of Florence Nightingale, whose courage, self-confidence, and resilience transformed nursing and the role of women in medicine
Sweeping yet intimate, Flight of the Wild Swan tells the story of Florence Nightingale, a brilliant, trailblazing woman whose humanity has been obscured beneath the iconic weight of legend. From adolescence, Nightingale was determined to fulfill her life’s calling to serve the sick and suffering. Overcoming Victorian hierarchies, familial expectations, patriarchal resistance, and her own illness, she used her hard-won acclaim as a battlefield nurse to bring the profession out of its shadowy, disreputable status and elevate nursing to a skilled practice and compassionate art.
In lush, lyrical detail, Melissa Pritchard reveals Nightingale as a rebel who wouldn’t relent—one whose extraordinary life offers a grand lesson in inspired will.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pritchard's splendid latest illuminates the life of Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) by portraying the idiosyncratic woman behind the Victorian icon. When Florence is a teen, her mother judges her "aloof" and "obstinate," while her father appreciates her intellect. At 16, Florence believes she hears God charging her to end the world's suffering. Her landed gentry parents reject her pleas to study nursing, however, as they consider the work to be squalid and menial. Florence spends a decade of forced inaction in deepening despair before she attempts suicide and her parents relent. By 30, she's a seasoned medical administrator who calls sanitation, hygiene, and statistics her "Earthly deities." Meanwhile, Britain is fighting Russia in the Crimea, where injured British soldiers face horrific conditions. Florence's friend Sidney Herbert, Britain's secretary of war, authorizes her to lead a contingent of nurses—the first women nurses for the British armed forces—to reform a military hospital near Constantinople. She arrives in 1854 to find the building rotting, the men in charge contemptuous, and hospital supplies insufficient to meet the seemingly endless stream of maimed soldiers, many dying of diseases rather than battlefield injuries. The novel's brief scenes are both vividly intimate and wide-angled enough to capture the complexity of Florence's life and times. Pritchard excels in this marvelous and moving work.