Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard

Credit: Bellevue Literary Press

 

In this episode of Narrative Edge, hosts Peter Biello and Orlando Montoya dive into Flight of the Wild Swan, a novel by Columbus, Georgia-based author Melissa Pritchard. The book offers a unique and intimate portrait of Florence Nightingale, famously known as the "Lady with the Lamp." Through vivid storytelling, Pritchard weaves together Nightingale's early life, her dedication to nursing, and her revolutionary contributions during the Crimean War.

Join Peter and Orlando as they explore Nightingale's fierce determination to pursue nursing against societal expectations, her controversial claim of being called by God, and her pivotal role in modernizing healthcare using statistical infographics. They also highlight Nightingale’s relationship with Sidney Herbert, a close collaborator in army medical reforms.

 

TRANSCRIPT: 

Orlando Montoya: Coming up in this episode.

Peter Biello: I didn't know much about her at all other than, you know, her name and that she was associated with nursing.

Melissa Pritchard: The next thing that came was a feeling of just almost an electrifying sense of I'm going to write a novel about this woman.

Peter Biello: "Quirky" seems dismissive of her.

Orlando Montoya: Well, the book is called "Wild."

Peter Biello: Yeah.

Orlando Montoya: How was she wild?

Peter Biello: This podcast from Georgia Public Broadcasting highlights books with Georgia Connections hosted by two of your favorite public radio book nerds, who also happen to be your hosts of All Things Considered on GPB Radio. I'm Peter Biello.

Orlando Montoya: And I'm Orlando Montoya. Thanks for joining us as we introduce you to authors, their writings and the insights behind their stories mixed with our own thoughts and ideas on just what gives these works the Narrative Edge.

Peter Biello: We're going back in time a little bit today, Orlando.

Orlando Montoya: So how far back are we going?

Peter Biello: We are going back to the 1800s, specifically the 1820s, starting in the 1820s and running through the end of the century. And we're going back in time to talk about Florence Nightingale.

Orlando Montoya: A name I know. A name everybody should know. The famous nurse.

Peter Biello: Yeah, the famous nurse pioneer in the field, so-called Lady with the Lamp.

Orlando Montoya: So we're talking about a biography?

Peter Biello: No, actually, this is a novelization of a part of her life by Melissa Prichard, who lives in Columbus, Ga. It's called Flight of the Wild Swan.

Orlando Montoya: And where does that title come from? Wild Swan.

Peter Biello: So it's fascinating, right? Like, during her research, Melissa Prichard came across a fact that Florence's mother had actually wondered aloud how a family of ducks such as the Nightingales could have hatched a wild swan like Florence. And she saw that line and she's like, "There's my title." So that's where it comes from. She was really quite an interesting person. I didn't know much about her at all other than, you know, her name and that she was associated with nursing. But let me turn this over to Melissa Prichard, who wrote this amazing book. It was reviewed well by The New York Times. The book doesn't sentimentalize Nightingale. It shows her as a precocious child obsessed with healing her animals and a person who believes she was called by God — literally, that God spoke to her. Here's how Prichard explains how she came to be interested in writing about Florence Nightingale.

Melissa Pritchard: Florence came about because I was in London in May of 2013, and I had seen that there was a Florence Nightingale museum at St. Thomas's Hospital. And I went, "Oh I remember reading about her when I was a child, and I love medical things, so I'm going to jaunt over there and see this little museum." So I walked over — this was in May 2013 — I walked over in the rain, got to this museum. I was the only person there. I had the whole museum to myself for the afternoon and I lost track of time in there. It was like I entered another dimension. And I — I was absolutely overwhelmed by her life and all the objects that related to her life and — And at one point, I stopped in front of an etching of Sidney Herbert, who she worked closely and collaboratively with in medical reform — army medical reform. And I stood there and I looked at him and I said she knew him. They had some sort of close relationship. Nothing — I didn't see anything romantic. And I just knew there was some bond that they share. And it turned out they did. And then I, the next thing that came was a feeling of just almost an electrifying sense of "I'm going to write a novel about this woman."

Peter Biello: And so she did. She visited that museum in 2013, but didn't write this novel until the COVID pandemic. And she did quite a bit of rewriting, essentially tore the novel down and then wrote it again. And the version that we have now is the result of that massive rewrite. This version of the novel switches perspectives, includes lots of letters from Nightingale and then takes a careful look at her relationship with Sidney Herbert, which is not romantic, as she said, but there is a certain level of passion underneath that I found really fascinating.

Orlando Montoya: So pieces of art speaking to her. God speaking to Florence Nightingale. Do we really believe any of this?

Peter Biello: Well, about the God thing: That's what she says, right? When she was 16, Florence Nightingale said she heard God speak to her — It was a day she always remembered — told her essentially that her calling was to help people.

Melissa Pritchard: And some biographers like to skirt around that issue of God speaking to her. You know, that sounds maybe with something psychological or who knows what was happening. But I feel that that was the bedrock of everything she did for the rest of her life, that she really — and she said she received impressions from then on and heard the voice of God 13 years later in Egypt telling her would she be willing to give up her worldly reputation, all of her worldly reputation in order to serve the suffering, help the suffering. So that was a defining point in her life, certainly.

Orlando Montoya: So we know Florence Nightingale, the nurse, but I imagine this book shows us a bit about how she got to be this famous person that we all know: the — the big Florence Nightingale.

Peter Biello: Yeah, it does show you that she was born into a wealthy family. We see her as a child helping injured rabbits, for example. Her father notices that she's just this brilliant, curious kid. Her family wants her to marry, enjoy a life of wealth and comfort. But she doesn't want that. She wants to go into nursing. She feels called to it, like we've been saying. But nursing back then is not respected like it is now.

Melissa Pritchard: Nursing in those days was the most disreputable thing you could want to be for a woman. Nurses were from the lowest classes. They were considered lower than servants, lower than actresses, lower than prostitutes. You couldn't ask to do a worse thing but to be a nurse, in those days, 19th century. And so for her to declare this to her parents was the vehement opposition she had to fight for years.

Peter Biello: And I guess you could say "nevertheless, she persisted" because she became the most famous nurse of all time.

Orlando Montoya: So what was her big break, so to speak? The thing that sort of propelled her to fame.

Peter Biello: She didn't like fame, but she certainly did have it, especially as the British were trying to clean up the public relations nightmare that came out of the Crimean War. The British government sent her and a cadre of nurses to Crimea to a place called Scutari Hospital, where corruption was essentially making conditions there orders of magnitude worse than they — they would have been. Men were dying more from the unsanitary conditions caused by bureaucratic penny-pinching than they were from battle injuries. And so the novel features Florence kind of fighting on behalf of the — the boys who were injured by war and then becoming sick. I mean, she was writing letters to the powers that be demanding better equipment, better resources. But meanwhile, journalists were doing something they hadn't done for nursing before, which is kind of elevating her work to heroic heights. "Look what these nurses are doing for Britain!" And that in a way changed the way nursing was perceived in creating this image of her in particular as a kind of savior. But there was, to some extent a problem with this.

Orlando Montoya: What was the problem with her being the savior?

Peter Biello: Well, she was, in — from her perspective, anyway, too good at her job. She was saving these young men only to have them return to the front lines for more injuries.

Melissa Pritchard: I think that at some point I felt that she realized in a sense, she was being used by the by the military, the British military, perhaps British government, as a foil to cover up — her celebrity, her celebrity, the angel of the Crimea — as a foil to cover up their mistakes, their lack of care and their corruption.

Peter Biello: So you can see by now that this book is not necessarily a romanticized picture of Victorian femininity. She is — she's a fighter out there fighting on behalf of, of these young men. And boy, she worked. I mean, she was almost compulsive about it. Well, reading this book, I thought maybe she was she was troubled or she she had some kind of trauma and perhaps she did. But I'm not going to wade into the psychology of it. But I did ask Melissa Pritchard if Nightingale was experiencing some kind of mental breakdown as she worked this hard.

Melissa Pritchard: I think that you could call it a kind of — it was definitely compulsive. She rarely slept. It's said that she rarely slept. She wrote enormous numbers of letters back to the government. She, every night, walked the wards. It was approximately a 4-mile walk every night carrying her lantern. Seeing how the — how her the patients were doing, writing letters home for them or their last letters home. It's almost like she couldn't stop. She lost weight. She was emaciated. She wore the same dress over and over. People were worried about her, really. And I think at one point — she hadn't even been there very long, she cut all her hair off and she said, "I can't be bothered with with hair. It's too much. I don't have time." I can't imagine when I try to put myself in her place, the stresses on her and some of the nurses who'd come with her were beginning to rebel. They hadn't expected anything as horrible as the conditions they encountered. And then she had strict rules and they didn't like that either. And so she felt very alone, I think, at times.

Peter Biello: And that period, the period during the Crimean War was just one part of her life. But the book spends a lot of time talking about both that part and her childhood — as we mentioned, her wealthy childhood and rebelling against her parents and conflict with her sister in particular, who is more of an ordinary type of ... of girl growing up in a in a wealthy family at that time.

Orlando Montoya: So we know that she left a mark on us today because we know her name. Talk about her mark on nursing.

Peter Biello: Well, from an early age, she liked putting things in order. And as she grew up, that manifested itself in the keeping of statistics. She did that during the Crimean War, and she actually developed these circular infographics that — that visually represented how troops were dying of preventable diseases. And those really made an impact.

Melissa Pritchard: Because she showed this chart to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and all these various other people who would never look at a bar chart or — you know, this they could see. And she designed it. So it would show that the majority of the deaths in the Crimean War of the British soldiers, far — by far — were from lack of hygiene, diseases like cholera, dysentery, only a few from battlefield wounds. And you can see it and you can't dispute it. It's right there in front of you in it. And it is pretty it's attractive to look at.

Orlando Montoya: Yeah, There is no understanding medicine today without charts and infographics.

Peter Biello: Right. So to bring that to medicine was — was really influential. I mean, it's incredible how she made this thing that we can't live without so essential. And she made the modernization of nursing her life's work. She also spent her later years doing a lot of nursing training, training other people to do the kind of work that she did. And what's striking here, too, is that she did it all with an incredible level of modesty. Like I mentioned earlier, she wasn't excited about fame. Even her headstone reflects that modesty.

Melissa Pritchard: She's buried with her family, her parents and her sister. And on the three sides, you know, there's her father, her mother, his sister with the typical ornate embellishments, Victorian quotes from the Bible. Now on her side, simply says F-dot-N-dot, her date of birth, her date of death, and a small, simple cross above it all. That's it. That said — that to me says everything about her.

Peter Biello: I should mention that I did this interview in Pritchard's home where her dog Hugo was our occasional noisy companion.

Orlando Montoya: And how did, how did the book end? It ends with her death?

Peter Biello: Well, I won't — I won't share the ending. You gotta get there. But I will say it was way worth getting there.

Orlando Montoya: All right.

Peter Biello: Yeah.

Orlando Montoya: And so it has a Narrative Edge

Peter Biello: it certainly does! It's on this program, so it has one. I feel like it doesn't give you too much. It — it holds back in just the right ways so that you get to know this — "quirky" doesn't seem — seem to — "quirky" seems dismissive of her, right?

Orlando Montoya: Well, the book is called Wild. How was she wild?

Peter Biello: She well, she just she followed her own path, right? This is what she wanted to do. Whether you believe she was actually called by God or she was just experiencing some kind of delusion, the fact is — is that she had her own way of being and she — There was nobody who was going to tell her no. And when she set her mind to it, she did things and she did things very well. She's very smart. And I think the short chapters, the sentence-level insights into this person also didn't mention anything about Sidney Herbert, too. I mean, he was — he doesn't appear much in the book. He was the guy that had that portrait. There's no romance between them. But there's such electricity. I mean, Sidney Herbert was married and a lot of people believe that — that Nightingale was — was chaste her entire life. But there was something between them that when they're just in the room together, the electricity on the page is just incredible. Hard not to notice it. And I think that was well done. Her — the details of her life were well done. Just an incredible book. Definitely worth reading.

Orlando Montoya: Well, the book is called Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard. Thanks for sharing it with me.

Peter Biello: Thanks, Orlando.

Orlando Montoya: Thanks for listening to Narrative Edge. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand-new episode. This podcast is a production of Georgia Public Broadcasting. Find us online at gpb.org/narrativeedge.

Peter Biello: You can also catch us on the daily GPB news podcast Georgia Today. For a concise update on the latest news in Georgia. For more on that and all of our podcasts, go to GPB.org/Podcasts.