SOURCE: Chapter III, Eminent Victorians, Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1918, pp. 164-87.

In the following excerpt, Strachey recounts Nightingale's reform efforts in England, undertaken after her return from the Crimean War.

The name of Florence Nightingale lives in the memory of the world by virtue of the lurid and heroic adventure of the Crimea. Had she died—as she nearly did—upon her return to England, her reputation would hardly have been different; her legend would have come down to us almost as we know it to-day—that gentle vision of female virtue which first took shape before the adoring eyes of the sick soldiers at Scutari. Yet, as a matter of fact, she lived for more than half a century after the Crimean War; and during the greater part of that long period all the energy and all the devotion of her extraordinary nature were working at...