A Lady 'in Proper Proportions'? Feminism, Lytton Strachey, and Florence Nightingale's Reputation, 1918-39.

Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians has long been regarded as a watershed in attitudes to Victorian culture, widely seen as having instigated a revolutionary backlash against the values and heroes of the Victorian era in England. Its impact, however, on the reputations of his four subjects-Thomas Arnold, General Gordon, Cardinal Manning and Florence Nightingale-has been subjected to surprisingly little scholarly attention. Drawing on the work of gender historians, this article reassesses Strachey's effect on the reputation of Nightingale, using biographies and contemporary reviews of Eminent Victorians. It argues that, far from 'debunking' the famous nurse as is generally assumed, Strachey in many ways enhanced her reputation and rendered her a plausible icon for English feminists of the 1920s and 1930s.