Florence Nightingale: The Wealthy Victorian Who Walked Away From Every Proposal | History for Sleep

She was born in a rented villa above Florence, Italy, into one of the most comfortable families in England, and her mother had every detail of her future already planned. This is the early life of Florence Nightingale - not the famous nurse of the Crimean War, but the girl who grew up between two grand country houses in Derbyshire and Hampshire, who turned down every marriage proposal that came her way (including one from a man who waited nine years for her answer), and who spent the first thirty years of her life quietly at war with her own family over what she was meant to become. We follow her from her birth in Italy through her privileged Victorian girlhood, her growing restlessness inside the drawing rooms her mother lived for, and the slow pull of a calling she could not explain to the people who loved her. A long and thoughtful evening inside the early life of one of history's most quietly stubborn women, told gently for quiet nights and restful sleep.