Her father Colonel James FitzGerald had served in the Indian Army during the Sepoy Mutiny; her mother's family included General Sir Thomas Picton, a distinguished soldier who was killed at Waterloo.
In the meantime, she wrote pot-boilers under the pseudonym Janet Gordon;[citation needed][2] this training was to stand her in good stead as an historian, as she mastered the art of writing entertaining narrative.
[1] Her meticulous research had taken nine years, and the book succeeded in restoring Nightingale's reputation, which had dwindled following Lytton Strachey's representation of her in Eminent Victorians.
The Reason Why (1953, Constable)[4] was a study of the Charge of the Light Brigade, a military disaster during the Crimean War and one of the defining events of the Victorian age.
It became her most popular book, and afterwards she explained to a television audience how she wrote it: working at a gallop through thirty-six hours non-stop without food or other break until the last gun was fired, when she poured a stiff drink and slept for two days.
[1] Alan Bennett wrote of her:Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings).