New letters recently came to light which seemed to suggest that Florence Nightingale broke a man’s heart in a cold and callous fashion. This was not the case, as Alistair Lexden showed in a letter published in The Times on December 22.
Sir, It is wrong to suggest that Florence Nightingale did not return the love of the handsome writer and book-collector Richard Moncton Milnes (“ Duchess’s library is literary goldmine”, Dec.16) who was later ennobled by Gladstone. He was “the man I adored”, she said. She went through agonies after turning down his marriage proposal, confiding to her diary in 1849 that “since I refused him not one day has passed without my thinking of him, that life is desolate without his sympathy”. But marriage was incompatible with this great woman’s need to “form for myself a true and rich life”.
Lord Lexden
London SW1