SOURCE: "Aggressive (Re)interpretations of the Female Sage: Florence Nightingale's 'Cassandra'," in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, edited by Thais E. Morgan, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 32-45.

In the following essay, Landow studies Nightingale's "Cassandra" as an example of feminine "sagewriting"—a gendered version of a prose style that borrows its techniques from Old Testament prophecy.

Were there any female Victorian sages? Were there any women who wrote the kind of aggressive prose created by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, a prose modeled on that of Jeremiah and Daniel? Florence Nightingale offers an interesting test case. Certainly, her Cassandra (1852) makes use of many techniques that characterize the writings of the Victorian sage in England and America, and in doing so it raises interesting questions about the relation, particularly during the nineteenth century, of gender and genre.

Like the writings of the Victorian sages and...