Nightingale's terrific letters

Florence Nightingale was so interesting, daring, and intelligent that reading her letters I had begun to feel, by comparison, frivolous, meek, and not terribly bright. 

Rosemary Mahoney, Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2007), p. 39. (Mahoney enriches her travel writing with quotations from earlier travelers. Florence Nightingale’s published letters are impressive.)