Nightingale’s Nuns and the Crimean War
Terry Tastard
Bloomsbury, £85, 216 pages
Those who learned their history from the Ladybird books (and subsequently had to learn something different) may remember the cover of the volume on Florence Nightingale. She stands calm, authoritative, sympathetic, a national heroine, holding a lantern: the epitome of compassion. “The lady of the lamp” of popular memory is history as myth; it was not a contemporary ascription, but came after her death. The reality is more nuanced and less romanticised, as Fr Terry Tastard (priest and academic) sets out in this excellent, elegantly written, dispassionate and judiciously argued account. He charts a course through confessional divisions and clashes of personality with aplomb.
