Florence Nightingale "was not simply the lady with the lamp," wrote A. G. Gardiner in 1914; "she was the lady with the brain and the tyrannic will." The self-effacing figure of popular myth--the "ministering angel" who appeared from nowhere, "moved like a benediction through the horrors of the hospitals of Scutari," and returned home to live the life of an invalid--contrasts sharply with reality. By the time she sailed for Scutari in 1854, Nightingale had made several trips to Europe, traveled up the Nile, established political and literary contacts, and published her first pamphlet. Indeed, she was a prodigious writer who penned more than two hundred books, pamphlets, and reports; hundreds of private "notes"; and some twelve thousand letters, both personal and official, during her lifetime. Although she wrote frequently about faraway places, her days as a traveler ended when her public career began. Jane Robinson's Wayward Women: A Guide to Women Travellers (1990) credits Nightingale with just two collections of travel writing: Letters from Egypt (1854), composed in 1849-50 and privately printed the year that Nightingale left for the Crimea, and Florence Nightingale in Rome: Letters Written by Florence Nightingale in Rome in the Winter of 1847-1848 (1981), a compilation "gleaned from family letters and published over seventy years after their writer's death."
Named for the Italian city that her parents were visiting at the time of her birth, Nightingale was born 12 May 1820 in Florence, the younger daughter of William Edward Nightingale, known as WEN, and Frances Smith Nightingale.
