SOURCE: "Not Choosing Not To Be: Victorian Literary Responses to Suicide," in Literature and Medicine, Vol. 6, edited by D. Heyward Brock, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 77-91.

In the following excerpt, Gates examines Nightingale's struggle with thoughts of suicide prompted by her early role as an idle, upper middle-class Victorian woman,

I have written elsewhere about Victorian medical opinion on suicide and about its relationship to English law and Victorian social and intellectual history.¹ Briefly, throughout the Victorian era, suicide was illegal, considered "self-murder" by the courts; until 1870 the goods and chattels of a suicide were legally forfeited to the Crown. But by the 1830s, coroner's juries had begun heavily to utilize a loophole in the law: they found more and more suicides "temporarily insane," a verdict which negated forfeiture and thus saved already aggrieved families the further ignominy of poverty. There were a number of ramifications...