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Una and the Lion is a commemoration by Florence Nightingale of the life of Agnes Elizabeth Jones, who was the first trained nursing superintendent of the Liverpool Workhouse infirmary. The work's title is a reference to the character of Una, in The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. Jones began her training as a nurse in 1862 at Nightingale's nursing school, and went on to become an advocate for the plight of the sick and the poor. She died of typhus fever in 1868.

ONE woman has died—a woman attractive and rich, and young and witty; yet a veiled and silent woman, distinguished by no other genius but the divine genius—working hard to train herself, in order to train others to walk in the footsteps of Him who went about doing good. To follow Him, she spent herself in activity; she overworked because others underwork. Shall we let her have died in vain?

She died, as she had lived, at her post, in one of the largest work-house infirmaries in this kingdom—the first in which trained nursing has been introduced. She is the pioneer of work-house nursing. I do not give her name; were she alive, she would beg me not. Of all human beings I have ever known, she was (I was about to say) the most free from desire of the praise of men. But I cannot say most free; for she was perfectly free. She was absolutely without human vanity; she preferred being unknown to all but God; she did not let her right hand know what her left hand did.

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The current Community collaboration is proofreading the text of Leaves of Grass (1860) Recent collaborations: The Sikh Religion, Eminent Women Series, Edward VII of the United Kingdom, Henry David Thoreau, WikiProject NARA

The current Proofread of the Month is The Hittites  (1890) by Archibald Henry Sayce. Recent collaborations: Chicago Poems, Felix Holt, the Radical, A History of Wood-Engraving, William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy, Unlawful Marriage, A Treatise on Medical Astrology, Evisceration, Fur and the Fur Trade, The Art of Modeling Flowers in Wax, On the Application of Sewage in Agriculture, Description of the Abattoirs of Paris, A Short Account of the Botany of Poole, A Contribution to the Pathology of Phlegmasia Dolens, The Real Cause of the High Price of Gold Bullion

NEW TEXTS

Cheap Tracts, calculated to promote the Interests of Religion, Virtue, and Humanity. No.XVIII. The Instructor (c. 1800)

by Unknown

A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1735 and 1890)

by Anthony Collins

Agrarian Justice (1797)

by Thomas Paine

What Katy Did at School (1876)

by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey

The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (1891)

by Irvine Garland Penn

The Satires, Epistles & Art of Poetry of Horace (1874)

by Quintus Horatius Flaccus, translated by John Conington

Adrift on an Ice-Pan (1909)

by Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

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