Good biographers make the best companions

Strange, when your own life flatlines, the way in which other lives become suddenly more interesting. I have been retreating into biographies and memoirs as never before, scouring them for accounts of incarceration, illness, boredom, family meltdowns and sudden financial freefalls. One of the pleasures of the genre is the way in which the peaks and troughs of a lifetime are resolved by the author into a pattern as ordered as a heart rate on a hospital monitor: this year was a low point and this one a high point; this experience proved to be a turning point, while this one was no more than a blip in the chart.

For a graph with a dramatic spike and a sudden plunge, I recommend Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend. For her first 34 years Nightingale was in self-isolation at home (the typical state for unmarried middle-class women), her desperation for adventure, as she put it, ‘eating out my vital strength’. For two brief years (1854-6) she cared for the wounded in the Crimea, after which she was sick herself. And for the next 50 years, propped up on pillows, she indulged her love of pie-charts. Preferring by far the administrative side of nursing, Nightingale was never happier than when demonstrating mortality rates in the colourful statistical diagrams she called ‘coxcombs’.

A less laudatory account of Nightingale’s achievement can be found in Lytton Strachey’s ironically titled Eminent Victorians, which I recommend to anyone experiencing generational differences. Written during the Great War and published in 1918, the aim of Strachey’s four brief portraits of Victorian icons (Nightingale, General Gordon, Cardinal Manning, and Dr Thomas Arnold) was to mock the self-regard of his predecessors and the ‘tedious panegyric’ of their biographical tradition.