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Book Reviewed by:
Peggy Kurkowski
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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.
Delirium
35 South Street
Mayfair
London 1877
She wakes in stale darkness, sweat-soaked, freezing. The same nightmare, always. A common grave, hundreds of the dead, their arms tightening around her, pulling her down. An indistinct murmur of voices. Some still in uniform, most writhing, naked. She cannot save them. Cannot save herself.
This time the waking is different. This time she is dying. She is sure of it. The nurse, Anna, will find her in the morning.
Then what?
Vultures descending. Family first. Spying. Searching through her things. Then the press. Speculating. Digging. She hasn't much. Papers. Paperwork, journals, letters. As she likes to say, enough writing to cover Australia.
Some things should never be read.
I stand at the Altar of these murdered men and while I live, I fight their cause.
Let them read that.
God spoke to me and called me to His service. What form this service was to take the voice did not say.
That, too.
Kindness to sick man, woman, and child came in with Christ.
The ...
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), known variously as the "Lady with the Lamp" or the "Ministering Angel" of the Crimean War (1853–1856), elevated the role of nursing into a profession—especially for women—in an era that had previously regarded female nurses with disdain. Relying on Nightingale's copious letters and journals and other documentary evidence, Melissa Pritchard's dazzling historical novel Flight of the Wild Swan brings this complex and idiosyncratic woman to exquisite life...continued
Full Review
(794 words)
(Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski).
Joan Silber, author of Improvement and Secrets of Happiness
What an amazing book this is. Florence Nightingale—with her insistent spiritual yearning and her work inside the horrors of war—is a large and quite astounding character, evoked by Pritchard in full intellectual depth. The journey this novel takes is mesmerizing and unforgettable. Joy Harjo, author of Poet Warrior: A Memoir and Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
Flight of the Wild Swan is the best of Melissa Pritchard. It combines her exquisite ear for tone and detail in story, her gift of mystic perception, and her sense of the historic layering of human lives and the events that make our lives absolutely distinct. In this novel, you will come to know Florence Nightingale close up, not as a faraway, distant figure. Suzanne Koven, MD, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician
Flight of the Wild Swan offers a fascinating immersion in the 19th-century world of drawing rooms and battlefields, crinolines and leeches. Just as vividly, Pritchard's tour de force evokes nursing and medicine today, when Florence Nightingale's pioneering contributions are still felt and in which women still struggle for equality. An enchanting, inspiring, and utterly relevant novel.![Florence Nightingale at Scutary [sic] Hospital](/images/ezines/nightingale.jpg "Miss Nightingale in the Hospital in Scutary [sic], 1856")
The Crimean War of 1853–1856 pitted the Russian Empire against an alliance of British, French, Turkish and Sardinian troops on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. Britain entered the war in March 1854 to protect its trading interests with Turkey, while France saw an opportunity for revenge against the Russians after Napoleon's defeat in 1812. In military terms, according to naval historian Andrew Lambert, "it was a midway point between Waterloo and World War One."
The war foreshadowed the horrors of the American Civil War, employing Napoleonic tactics with improved weaponry. The human death toll was appalling—roughly 25,000 British, 100,000 French and up to a million Russians died. But the vast majorities of...
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