Laura Elvery is an author of unbridled curiosity, able to take a single spark of inspiration and create an entire world that is based in fact but simultaneously enriched, enlarged and enlightened by her fictional skills. With two collections of award-winning short stories to her credit, her latest work – NIGHTINGALE (UQP 2025) – is a novel loosely based on the life of Florence Nightingale, the spark of the initial idea created when Elvery found a second-hand biography in a shop in Oxford in 2022.
I say ‘loosely based’, as although the famous nurse Florence Nightingale is at the heart of this novel, and we read a third of the book from her perspective, Elvery’s imagination has taken full flight with the creation of two other key characters, Silas and Jean. In what is part historical, part ghost story, part clever invention, NIGHTINGALE features all three protagonists in equal intensity and agency, the result an unforgettable story of love, passion, desire, ambition, duty and responsibility, scaffolded by the horrific truths of the visceral brutality of war, and lightened by the compassion of those women in past conflicts who cared for the men who were fighting.
Much of Nightingale’s story is set in Mayfair in 1910, where at the age of 90, the now frail (and perhaps delusional?) Florence lives a reclusive life, cared for by a companion who sees to her daily needs, much as Florence dedicated her whole life to caring for others. The ‘lady of the lamp’ was not only a nurse ahead of her time (sanitation! ventilation!), but also a writer and statistician. Now she waits quietly for her own death. But one summer evening she receives an astonishing visitor, a young man Silas Bradley, who claims to have known Florence during the Crimean War 55 years earlier. Of course this is impossible, as Silas is in his 20’s. And yet, with everything Florence has experienced in the last years of her life, she is not surprised by this inevitable reunion. Her main question is what does it mean, for her?
We are also treated to Florence Nightingale’s life as a child, a young woman and during her career as a respected nurse, a medical professional who advised doctors and surgeons, and led a remarkable band of female nurses who would change the way of thinking about wound care, cleanliness and the general encouragement of recovery and good health.
In between, we are given the perspective of Silas Bradley, who was indeed a young soldier in the Crimean War – his hopes and expectations, his dreams and ambitions and fears. To say much more would be a spoiler but expect the unexpected.
The middle of some novels can be ‘saggy’ or slow, a stilted connection between the shocking opening and the satisfying resolution, but in NIGHTINGALE, Elvery avoids this entirely through the point of view of the enigmatic Jean Frawley, the third main character. Again, to say much more would be a spoiler, but Jean is the pivotal protagonist who pins Florence and Silas together, and her life is crucial to the outcomes for both. Her actions are incomprehensible and prohibited while at the same time being as inevitable, natural and believable as breathing.
Through these three characters, we glimpse the horrors of war, the vivid, raw and messy complexities of injuries and blood and ill-equipped surgeries and impatient doctors and soldiers/patients as frightened as children. But we also witness the care and compassion of nurses, the vulnerability and strengths of women called to nursing as a vocation, the remarkable acts of devotion and kindness, and the courage of women well versed in family care but ill-prepared for the visceral reality of conflict. The women in NIGHTINGALE have agency, feelings, ambitions, desires, plans, secrets and deep wells of bravery despite all they must confront.
NIGHTINGALE is brilliant, original and haunting, told in three compelling and authentic voices; it is sharp, witty, ferocious, tender, wise and engaging. Like a lamp light in the darkness, NIGHTINGALE illuminates the life of this remarkable woman in an inventive and crystalising way.