Love Letters – An Exploration – With Writer Melissa Pritchard
As She Gives Insight into Her New Novel Flight of the Wild Swan
It’s the day before Valentine’s Day, and writer Melissa Pritchard sits down at a coffee shop not far from her Midtown home to talk about her latest novel.
“I’m very excited, very thankful, so far about the response,” Pritchard says of all the big buzz surrounding Flight of the Wild Swan, her historical fiction tale of the life and times of Florence Nightingale.
Though an acclaimed writer with an accomplished career as a novelist, journalist and educator, Pritchard says this is the first time she’s ever received starred reviews in both book-industry heavy hitters, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. In the weeks leading up to its March 12 release on Bellevue Literary Press, Pritchard stays busy coordinating events on both coasts, from presentations to nursing colleges to the Los Angeles Book Festival, to promote Flight of the Wild Swan. On March 15, LitHub will epublish her essay, “Tolstoy & Nightingale: Binary Stars.”
“I believe in the book so much because I believe in her so much,” she says of Nightingale. “The need for her story to be told, I’ve felt it so forcefully before. I want her story to be more widely known”
Pritchard was able to delve deep into Nightingale’s life — her groundbreaking work as a nurse, her life in upper-crust Victorian society of 19th century England – thanks to her lengthy papertrail, which includes more than 4,000 letters, hundreds of articles, speeches written to be delivered to British Parliament by her male colleagues (women were barred from speaking before Parliament), plus an 800-page meditation on her philosophy of religion, of which she printed just six copies and shared privately. “That was smart, because if she put that out in the world, she would have been seen as a heretic,” Pritchard explains.
“She was a revolutionary,” Prichard says. “She was a mystic. A visionary. She has something to say to women today because we are still having the same problems.”
Asked what she thinks Nightingale would be like if she worked as a nurse today at Piedmont Hospital, Pritchard, as elegantly charming as she is intellectually intense, answers instantly: “She’d be running Piedmont Hospital. She was a brilliant administrator and very organized. She’d be very interested in AI, and she’d always be on the side of the poor.”
After all her exhaustive reading and research, Pritchard knew her character’s many achievements, which include: developing training programs still used today; being the reason nurses wear uniforms; helping improve sanitation in India; designing field hospitals for the Union Army during the Civil War; inventing the pie chart (a statistical genius, she loved data).
Pritchard confesses to being a bit intimidated at first by her subject’s incisive thinking and masterful use of language, but knew she had to tell Nightingale’s tale and tell it now: “The timing of this book is serendipitously good. There are no novels about her as far as I know. There’s a couple of bad movies about her. I couldn’t watch them. Just added to the myth.”
Pritchard dedicated Flight of the Wild Swan “to my husband and heart’s companion,” Dr. Philip T. Schley, whom she met after arriving in Columbus from Arizona in 2016 after being accepted at CSU’s Carson McCullers Center as Writer-in-Residence.
“Ever since I met him I’ve been writing,” she explains. “He learned pretty quickly that being married to a writer is not necessarily romantic. I need this time to myself. Have to have it. I dedicated this book to Philip because he’s been so patient and understanding, which I haven’t always found to be the case before him. He’s read this book in all its iterations countless times. He’s a wonderful editor. He catches things and points out in a kind way what I’d missed.”
Their love story “was like somebody had written a script about it and I was supposed to walk through it,” she says. “Stunning the way it unfolded. It was so destined. I thought about writing about it but it’s too close.”
Asked if it’s true that every story is a love story, Pritchard recalls a lesson from writer Annie Dillard – her first writing teacher, who later described her former student as “one of our finest writers” – and taught her it is true every story is a love story, but there are all kinds of love. “When we think of love, we think of romance, of Valentine’s Day and Hallmark things,” Pritchard says. “But you can look around any day and see love stories going on everywhere.”
Before Pritchard visited the Florence Nightingale museum in London in 2013, she only knew the myth, the stereotypical image of the lady walking with the lamp, likely from a child’s biography book her mother gave her. Touring the dimly lit labyrinth, Pritchard realized, “There was so much more to her than I could have possibly imagined. I got so wrapped up in her life.”
When she stood in front of a portrait of Sir Sidney Herbert, whom Nightingale worked with closely as England’s Secretary of War during the Crimean War. “I had a revelation of sorts,” Pritchard recalls. “A feeling of being struck by something, like I was being given knowledge; not necessarily a love affair, but there was something there. I thought, ‘I’m going to write about this woman. A novel. I hadn’t gone to the museum with that intention but I came out with a stack of books knowing I was going to.”
Pritchard discovered Nightingale’s complexity. She was “a difficult person” who spent her entire life battling against the restraints upper-class Victorian society placed on what a woman could be – which wasn’t a nurse, a profession considered close to prostitution , one her parents had extreme disapproval of.
Nightingale volunteered to nurse soldiers fighting in the Crimean War and take 36 nurses with her. Many of them later left due to the brutal, violent conditions. British Army officers didn’t want Nightingale there, while politicians back home pushed her as a celebrity, a feel-good distraction from their ineptness and corruption.
What Nightingale found in the midst of all the blood and death was connection with the footsoldiers, the poor, often Irish, who served as cannon fodder for low pay and free beer. “She called them, ‘My boys,’” Pritchard explains. “She loved them and they loved her.”
Attractive and wealthy, the famed nurse had many suitors but refused marriage, confessing in her notes she was called to do God’s work in life. Pritchard initially wrote Flight of the Wild Swan with a romance between her famed nurse and Herbert. She eventually cut that plotline after concluding Victorian morality, and Herbert’s strong marriage, likely prevented an affair.
“Florence Nightingale loved nature, she loved animals, she loved learning,” Prithcard says. “As for Sir Herbert, I wrote a scene based on her visiting him when he was extremely ill, desperate to think up remedies, not allowing him to talk about his death. After he died—he was 55, she lived to be 90—she wrote to her father, ‘I am his true widow. No one knew him like I did. There’s a love story there, of sorts, about one that never can come to be, which are the most heart-wrenching ones.”
** Flight of the Wild Swan will be available everywhere March 12. Visit melissapritchard.com to buy it or to learn more about this fascinating, fantastic Columbus writer. **
By Frank Etheridge