Nightingale, Florence (1820-1910)

Florence Nightingale was a nursing reformer who admired George Eliot's work, although she did criticize the way Dorothea’s story ends in Middlemarch. Nightingale and Eliot met in June 1852 when Nightingale and her aunt visited Eliot at 142 Strand, John Chapman's London home. Eliot liked them both and expressed much praise for Florence: “There is a loftiness of mind about her which is well expressed by her form and manners” (2:45).