Today I’m bringing a book so good I’ve already given my copy to my mum, and she’s loving it. Laura Elvery’s Nightingale.

Laura Elvery is the author of Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter. As readers of Ordinary Matter will know, Laura has an interest in women who have been ignored, or perhaps misunderstood by history.

Nightingale takes us into the final days of the life of iconic nurse, statistician and social reformer Florence Nightingale. At ninety years old, Nightingale knows how much she has achieved in her life. Yet as she lies in her bed, all of that still doesn’t compensate for the infirmity she feels. That and the fact her only visitor is Mabel, her housekeeper and nurse. At least the window is open, bringing in the lifegiving air she has sought out her entire life.

At her age a knock on the door could as well be a dream, and so it is with some surprise that Florence welcomes into her home a young soldier. A man who says he met Florence in Scutari, a man named Silas Bradley. 

From here we are thrown back into Florence’s past as we revisit her time at Scutari, the military hospital where she made her reputation. We confront the horrors of war and the reality of women who sought to be more than the confines of the society that raised them.

As I began reading Nightingale I reflected on how my understanding of Florence Nightingale exists in broad brushstrokes and contains perhaps as much myth as fact. Her historical figure can sometimes seem two-dimensional as the lady with the lamp, the founder of modern nursing. Of course she was also famed for her statistical work that helped identify the impacts of unclean environments in war mortality, significantly ahead of the development of germ theory. 

The novel acknowledges the legend as well as the woman in an intricate narrative exploring the very human factors of the work of nursing. Of course Nightingale is heralded for the lives her pioneering work saved, but the novel gives equal hearing to the lives lost and the impact these losses made on the life of Florence Nightingale.

Florence’s story entwines with that of Jean, a young nurse in Florence’s care and that of Silas, equally young and a soldier in the war. That their lives are given central concern highlights the fact that so many like them were to die with their lives untold. 

Elvery’s narrative offers an ingenious trick of immortality in the telling of these exemplary lives and also offers us as readers a chance to wonder at the whole process of celebrating the brutality they were forced to be a part of.

There’s a central conceit to Nightingale that I’m going to leave unspoken in this review. It asks the reader to consider the myth making as only one part of the story of Florence Nightingale and offers up a different type of endurance to the legacy of being so great in the face of so much horror. This conceit can be paired with the refrain ‘Let me tell you what it’s like’, wherein characters seek to explain, to offer up, or perhaps transfer something of their experience as form of bondage but also connection.