Florence Nightingale is best known as the saintly “Lady With the Lamp,” patrolling the dark corridors of a British military hospital in Constantinople as she tended to wounded and dying soldiers shipped back from the front lines of the Crimean War. In her latest novel, FLIGHT OF THE WILD SWAN (Bellevue Literary Press, 416 pp., paperback), Melissa Pritchard makes Nightingale’s heroism even more intimate — and more interesting — by portraying her not as “some sweet, feminine savior” but as a stubborn, tormented striver who spent her youth and early adulthood struggling to break free from the constraints of Victorian society.

Born into a wealthy family, given more education than most women, Nightingale inhabited a gilded cage most would have found easy to accept. We first meet her in 1827 as a 7-year-old exploring her father’s Derbyshire estate and accompany her in her teens and 20s through European travels, a grand tour of Egypt and years of fending off marriage proposals from a well-connected member of Parliament. Yet Nightingale refuses to settle into the comfortable life her parents have planned for her. At 16, she privately dedicates herself to ending the suffering she sees all around, but it’s only when she’s in her early 30s, after surviving a suicide attempt, that she’s allowed to pursue her medical studies. Granted a yearly allowance, she’s finally “free as any man.”

By spending the first half of the novel acquainting readers with Nightingale’s thwarted ambitions, Pritchard adroitly prepares us for the high drama of her attempt to fulfill them in the combat zone. In addition to the appalling conditions she finds at the crumbling Turkish barracks that’s been turned into a hospital, Nightingale must do battle with incompetent bureaucrats and British medical officers who dismiss her band of nurses as “a garden tea party.” Small wonder that she exhausts herself and her companions; even her friends sometimes view her as a “monster.” However, Nightingale is equally hard on herself. By patching up men so they can return to the carnage, she is, she admits, “as much a murderer as any elite officer in this hellish enterprise.”

The friction between Nightingale and her jealous, unstable older sister provides a crucial undercurrent to the central action of Pritchard’s novel. In THE PAINTER’S DAUGHTERS (Simon & Schuster, 342 pp.), Emily Howes places the relationship of Peggy and Molly Gainsborough front and center. From the very beginning, it’s clear there’s something wrong with Molly. As Peggy puts it, “Her eyes flick onto mine, but she is not there.” Although one year younger, Peggy resolves to care for her sister by hiding her sporadic bouts of mental illness, terrified Molly will wind up in the “madhouse.” Eventually, the entire household is caught up in this charade, lest scandal threaten Thomas Gainsborough’s artistic career. “However much my father rises,” Peggy explains, “he remains a tradesman.”

Peggy is a sympathetic if painfully naïve narrator, and as the sisters grow older the tension between her protective instincts and her own aspirations erupt in a romantic rivalry that can only end in tragedy. Interspersed with Peggy’s account of her family is another narrative, set a generation earlier, that may explain the shameful mystery surrounding her mother’s background and perhaps even the root cause of Molly’s malady. “You are girls of lineage,” their mother has insisted, “of heritage you cannot possibly understand.”

The malady that afflicted the Thoreau family was consumption, striking down three generations. The insidious influence of the disease, which we now call tuberculosis, lingers in the background of Helen Humphreys’s FOLLOWED BY THE LARK (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 240 pp.), in which she strings together a series of vignettes to form a poetic fictional biography of Henry David Thoreau. There are glimpses of his Transcendentalist circle, but Humphreys prefers to concentrate on friendships with the less well-known figures who join him on treks through woods and fields.

To Thoreau, the premature deaths of his brother and a close friend are agonizing reminders of the fragility of life, as are changes coming to Concord, Mass., and to the country as a whole in the decades before the Civil War. He revisits the site of his old house on Walden Pond: “When he listened for the sound of a bird in the forest, all he heard was the steady beat of the wood chopper’s ax.” The roar of a new train line is also audible everywhere. Earning his living as a surveyor, Thoreau has ample opportunity to gauge alterations to the world he once knew.

Still, nature’s glories can’t be eclipsed, and this is where Humphreys’s narrative is most evocative — particularly in the spring, when Thoreau finds it impossible to document so much new life in his journal. “He used to be frustrated by this,” Humphreys writes, “but now that he was older, he just gave over to it when it happened. He was even a bit relieved when it did happen, when spring became a green furnace that burned through every hour.” In the end, he finds individual words and voices less convincing than “the chorus of nature’s cacophony.”