A Grand Quarrel: Elizabeth Gaskell, Florence Nightingale and mothers today

Published 26 June 2025

A Grand Quarrel reconstructs an extraordinary dispute between two of the most brilliant women of the nineteenth century: the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and the nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale. Gaskell had four daughters and believed mothers had a vital role throughout their children’s lives. Nightingale was an iconoclast who told Gaskell that all mothers should put their babies into crèches and go out to work. Only Gaskell recorded this quarrel. But Naomi Stadlen, historian and psychotherapist, specialising in problems of mothers, has pieced together, from the private writings of both women, the issues at stake. Her final chapter explores how these issues are relevant, painful and unresolved for mothers today.