Nightingale by Laura Elvery
“Florence had been a rich child, living in an enormous house with cooks and governesses and gardeners. But the one thing Florence always said she missed in her old age was her bare skin against the warm green grass.”
I’m not usually one for historical fiction; my bookshelves tend to favour contemporary and surreal narratives. But Laura Elvery’s Nightingale (2025, UQP) caught my attention, firstly for the chosen character and secondly for its intriguing premise. Though grounded in a particular time (the grim margins of the Crimean War), Nightingale veers away from a simple fictionalised retelling of history and instead floats between past and present, realism and something far more eerie.
Told from three distinct perspectives, each voice in Nightingale slowly reveals more and more of a puzzle for which there are no easy answers. Opening with Florence Nightingale’s perspective, we are introduced to her as an old woman, cared for by a young nurse and housekeeper. She spends her days reminiscing about the horrors of war, the men she saved and those she didn’t. The ghosts of these men flit in and out of her consciousness, moving through the walls of her bedroom and her mind:
“But then I recall those other soldiers who have found me here on South Street in the dead of night, although those ones came through the walls or down from the ceiling, landing on my bed like cats.”
When a man, Silas Bradley, knocks on the door asking to see her to understand his own past, it’s unclear whether he is yet another ghostly apparition, a real man, or something much harder to define. Silas has been seeking Nightingale for some years and he comes to her with a burning question only she can answer:
“And fear now at who this man is and what his true purpose might be. I shuffle across the bed and pull a cloth from my drawer. I mean to pat my cheeks with it but I sit against the headboard and twist the flannel between my fingers.”
Tying the two together is Jean Fawley, a young nursing understudy of Nightingale’s from the Crimean War some fifty years prior, and the shocking, impulsive act that saw her turned away from a career in nursing. But if it’s Jean that connects them, how is it that Silas hasn’t aged while Nightingale is on the verge of leaving the world? What do these threads of time represent and what happens when they’re unravelled?
“In two paces the assistant was next to Jean, smacking her away from the fragile, wet, lovely thing inside. A swift slap. A naughty girl. Some words from the doctor at Silas’s right side, but he didn’t meet her eye. And then the room was still.”
Elvery understands pace, not just as a mechanic of plot, but as a rhythm for the reader, knowing exactly when to hold a moment close, and when to let it go. The novel’s historical elements serve to anchor the narrative but, grim as some of these elements are, they never drown the mystery and the deeper story at the heart of the novel. While Elvery has given us a story of the past, it feels startlingly contemporary in its explorations of power, womanhood and the slipperiness of truth.
Nightingale is a novel of shadows: women working in the margins of history, truths half-buried, and the way grief, both personal and collective, can shape reality in strange, sideways ways.
Most of all, I admired the way Elvery evokes the quiet force of Florence Nightingale, as a woman wielding real power at a time when power was kept out of women’s hands. It’s clear Elvery has done her research, bringing Nightingale to life in a new, unnerving, but ultimately human way, showing us her vulnerabilities through the eyes of Jean, her housekeeper Mabel, and Silas – three people who have known her at very different stages in her life, in very different ways.
In Nightingale, Elvery reminds us that history is not fixed; it is told and retold, haunted by gaps, unknowns and half truths – and those are the best places where fiction comes to life.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
