Nightingale by Laura Elvery review – Florence Nightingale inspires a luminous historical novel

The Guardian

22-05-2025

The year is 1850, the eve of the Crimean war, and Florence Nightingale is watching a group of boys at play. From a distance, she composes the scene, preparing to describe it in a letter to her aunt. 'How did she want this part to sound?' she wonders – less concerned with what is happening than how it might be narrated. When she realises the boys are not kicking a ball but tormenting a baby owl, she doesn't recoil. The horror of the image lands alongside another realisation: the story 'might be better' now, though she is left considering how best to reframe the violence for her aunt: 'Knowing she would narrate it later back in the house … Florence would have to tell the story a different way'. That instinct – to reshape the unbearable into something legible – sits at the core of Nightingale, Laura Elvery's rich and exacting novel about violence, care and memory.
In 1910, a young English soldier, Silas Bradley, appears on Florence's doorstep, claiming they met during the Crimean war half a century before. He's confused, searching for answers about lives that looped briefly and painfully around his own; his appearance also forces Florence to confront ghosts in her own past.
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Though the novel bears Florence's name, the story belongs not just to her but also to Silas, as well as Jean Frawley, a young nurse stationed at Scutari under Nightingale's charge. As the novel sifts through voices and memories, we see versions of Florence throughout her life, in 1850, 1854, 1861 and 1910: as a young woman determined to forge a path in a world that resents her ambition; becoming a public figure blamed for the chaos she tried to manage; and, in the final year of her life, disabled and in declining health.
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Rather than placing Florence at the centre of the narrative, Elvery lets her hover at the edges. It is through Jean that we see Florence most closely during the war, in which she became known as the famous 'lady with the lamp'. The nurses in Scutari quickly come to know her as 'Miss N': a tidy, disciplined presence who watches over them like a schoolmistress, observing surgeries, airing hospital rooms, and maintaining the order and hygiene of her ward with matronly authority. She is feared, respected, and often inscrutable. But a portrait still emerges of a woman burdened with duty. 'At night I prayed to God,' Florence reflects, 'and I contemplated my evidence and my questions about a war that killed twenty thousand British soldiers.'
The physical world of Nightingale is rendered in extraordinary detail. It returns again and again to the physicality of care, to the 'women's work' of 'holding up bodies': the 'sourness of damp clothes', 'scraps of dirty butter and sometimes-fresh meat', the 'tongue-pink, bacon-pink, brick-red, yellow' of a man's exposed ribs. Elvery's prose is both sensual and brutal, lingering on textures, smells and colours that refuse abstraction. These visceral scenes contrast with sunlit images of 'clean sheets like white petals,' the 'powerful brown bodies' of horses, 'a gentle, wheaty voice'. It's this duality that defines Nightingale: the tension between order and chaos, between what can be managed and what must be borne.
War is stripped of sentimentality: there are no grand speeches and battlefield heroics, just the repetitive, accumulating devastation of young men dying far from home, 'felled like trees while the sun turned overhead'. The war in Nightingale is not cinematic. It is slow, exhausting, relentless. What matters is not whether it is won, but how it is endured – and who cleans up the mess.
Florence herself is only 36 years old when she leaves Scutari. She has 'vaulted over the tyranny of idleness' expected of women of her class, but her leadership is tolerated only so long as it conforms to a certain moral cleanliness. She is blamed for the consequences of combat by the very men whose wars she tried to make survivable. 'That those men should blame me,' Florence says, 'as though I had been the one to build a hospital over a cesspool.'
Ghosts – of memory, of war, of lives unlived – haunt the novel's edges. Florence, in her old age, reflects 'the thoughts of my life are like an enormous knotted scarf, each knot a prayer'. Time, accordingly, slips and loops. The plot is oblique, passing in a series of scenes and images – like the flashes of memory. This gives Nightingale a slippery, dreamlike quality which may not appeal to every reader. Its fragmentary structure occasionally risks the narrative feeling remote, its emotional resonance dulled. But if the characters feel a little one-dimensional at times, it's balanced by the richness of the world they inhabit.
Nightingale is a luminous, fragmentary exploration of what war takes from those who are not asked to fight. Circling rather than marching, it invites us to look not at the battles, but at what comes after; and not at the heroes, but at the women who held them up.
Nightingale by Laura Elvery is out through UQP, $32.99