Florence Nightingale: 'Cassandra' and 'Suggestions for Thought' (N Y U Press Women's Classics) (Hardcover)

by Mary Poovey (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

"An impressively reasoned and startlingly unorthodox treatise on religion."
—Belles Lettres

Florence Nightingale (1820-1920) is famous as the heroine of the Crimean War and later as a campaigner for health care founded on a clean environment and good nursing. Though best known for her pioneering demonstration that disease rather than wounds killed most soldiers, she was also heavily allied to social reform movements and to feminist protest against the enforced idleness of middle-class women.

This original edition provides bold new insights into Nightingale's beliefs and a new picture of the relationship between feminism and religion. Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth Among the Artisans of England (1860), which contains the novel Cassandra, is a central text in 19th-century history of feminist thought and is published here for the first time. Nightingale argues that work was the means by which every individual sought self-fulfillment and served God. She wrote influentially about the group most Victorians declared to be above work: unmarried, middle-class women.

About the Author

Mary Poovey is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology and Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley and Uneven Developments: The Ideological Works of Gender in Mid-Victorian England.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 244 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (February 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814757731
• ISBN-13: 978-0814757734
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
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• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,192,262 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)