The Florence Nightingale in my novel The Twelve Rooms of the Nile is a sassy, ebullient and witty woman. But it took years of research to find this Nightingale, to liberate her from more than a century of wildly varied biography and opinion. Along the way I encountered distortion, myth and lacunae on a grand scale.
Initially, my ideas about Nightingale were based on popular culture and a single famous biography. From the former came the familiar if gauzy figure of the Lady with the Lamp—heroine of the Crimean War and inventor of nursing. Then in college I read ...
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