Archive for May, 2010

Yesterday we received the sad news that Barbara Godard had passed away suddenly as a result of complications due to illness.  Barbara was a long-time friend of the press, as a contributor to our book on translation, Writing Between the Lines (ed. Agnes Whitfield), as the book review editor of Topia, and most recently as co-editor, with Di Brandt, of Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry.

Barbara’s work, and her mentoring of and collaboration with colleagues, has had and will continue to have a large impact on Canadian literature and cultural studies. She will be missed.

For other tributes to Barbara and her work, see rob mclennan’s blog, York University News, Coach House Books, and yourkeyed blog.

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On the day of her birth and in the centenary year of her death, this seems a good time to pay tribute to Florence Nightingale, pioneer of professional nursing. WLU Press is the proud publisher of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, edited by Lynn McDonald, and will later this year release Volume 14 in the series, with just two left to go.

When I (Clare) first started at the press, Vols. 1 and 2 were just coming out, and it was hard to imagine that one day there would be 16. An enormous amount of work by Lynn McDonald and her team has meant continuous volumes, with the two most recent focusing on the history of nursing.

Florence Nightingale is most known as the “lady with the lamp” from the Crimean War, but much of what has been written about her has been full of error and a misreading of the primary sources. The Collected Works presents Florence Nightingale’s own writings on subjects as diverse as politics, social welfare, religion, health care, and India, to name just a few.

The Collected Works can be found at most academic libraries, but if these large works are too daunting for you and you would still like accurate information about Nightingale, look for Florence Nightingale at First Hand, a slim volume of her writings. The book presents a Florence Nightingale for the twenty-first century: she was a prodigiously astute researcher, a bold systems thinker, and a witty writer well connected with political and intellectual leaders.

On this day especially, we celebrate nurses and nursing and honour the legacy of an amazing woman.

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