Critical Praise

"Nightingales brilliantly captures the unique intensity both of individuals and an age. Gill vividly evokes the complex and fascinating interrelations of an exceptional family. She engages her reader at every step as we travel with the fiercely intelligent and charismatic Florence Nightingale on her remarkable life journey."

——Anna Beer, author of My Just Desire

"Nightingales is wonderful. I will certainly never again dare to think of Florence Nightingale as 'a lifelong spinster' with an invalid's need for noble self-sacrifice, but as a powerful woman who changed the course of the British government toward their own wounded forever."

——Nancy Milford, author of Savage Beauty and Zelda

"Imaginatively conceived and elegantly written, Nightingales tells the compelling story of a family and an era with great style and flair. Even minor characters are wonderfully drawn and the tone is both intimate and erudite."

——Diane Jacobs, author of Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

"A beautifully written and nuanced portrait . . . Gill infuses her subject with rare vitality and untangles the strands of historical, social, and personal forces that determine the course of female life. This multifaceted approach challenges the myths surrounding Nightingale's struggle for fulfillment, giving us a fascinating window into one Victorian woman that becomes a lens through which we can view ourselves."

——Susan Hertog, author of Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"A dynamic and absorbing account, written in a lively and captivating manner, of a remarkable family and its even more remarkable scion, Florence Nightingale. Gill has used her sources to maximum effect, engaging the reader in a pacy narrative that brings that far distant 'other country,' the Victorian age, so vividly to life. I highly recommend it!"

——Alison Weir, author of Eleanor of Aquitaine