SOURCE: "From Novel to Essay: Gender and Revision in Florence Nightingale's 'Cassandra'," in The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 23-40.

In the following essay, Snyder investigates the literary and cultural significance of Nightingale's transformation of "Cassandra" from a novel written from a feminine point of view to an anonymously-narrated essay.

"About Cassandra I see that I was mistaken. I did not exactly take Cassandra for yourself, but I thought that it represented more of your own feeling about the world than could have been the case."¹ Thus wrote Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, in a letter to Florence Nightingale sometime between May and July of 1861. Their correspondence had begun the previous summer when Arthur Hugh Clough, Nightingale's secretary and an undergraduate contemporary of Jowett's, asked Jowett to comment on a three-volume work...