LAURA ELVERY Nightingale. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Award-winning short story writer Laura Elvery’s first novel delivers a vivid portrait of Florence Nightingale and the horrors of war.

Bodies fall apart. Things come to an end. Everyone wants to make me comfortable, I know that. How many times have I murmured something just the same? What do you want? What do you need? What I want though is to feel no pain. What I want is a lover, a swim in the ocean, my body in the grass.

It is August 1910 and Florence Nightingale is a frail ninety year old, confined to her bed in her Mayfair home and being looked after by Mabel, ‘the girl downstairs, who right now is playing a game of drop the pots and pans’.

She lies there remembering her youth: the three-legged cat she rescued when she was 14; afternoon tea in Kew Gardens at 21; and at 35 ‘watching men die in that kingdom of nightmare’. She has dreams in which she comforts dying boys: ‘My children. I wipe their brows, saying things will be better soon.’ And ghosts visit her: her pet owl, Athena; and the ghosts of many of the wounded and dying men she and her nurses had cared for in the hospital at Scutari in the Crimea: ‘Sometimes they come through the window, sometimes from behind the mirror. They never stay long.’

When Silas rings her doorbell, she imagines that she gets up and goes down the stairs to let him in – ‘If Mabel catches me, there’ll be trouble’ – but ‘No! … I realise it was yet another dream … A fool to think it.’

Silas Bradley, when he gets to her room, looks to her like ‘a man who resembles a boy’ and she recognises him, gets ‘a flash of ribcage open to air’, and then of a girl she had dreamed about the night before, Jean. Florence thinks he is a ghost: ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’ she asks, but he doesn’t answer.

It becomes clear that Silas knew Florence 55 years ago in Scutari, and that he has been searching for Jean ever since then and has a vital question to ask Florence. Throughout the book the reader is never quite sure if he is a ghost. He tells us that this is his ‘second life’; that his breathing is different; that since he was a boy he has experienced being ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’; and the thought of ‘sleeping forever’ because he is so tired, would be ‘simply another of my hibernations’. Everyone seems to believe that he died under surgery in Scutari. Yet, here he is, seemingly full of life, often complaining of pain, remembering how, after the war, he fell in love with a woman called Meg, and chatting to Mabel when she lets him in, and to Florence.

Laura Elvery weaves his story together with that of Florence. Each remembers the past, the decisions they made, and what they did, but they live, too, in the present, so that Mabel becomes part of their story. Most of all, however, it is Jean, when we meet her, who links past and present and reveals the horrors she, Silas and Florence lived through in Crimea.

In Elvery’s book, Jean’s memories of Scutari overlap with Florence’s, and for both what they experienced in the Barrack Hospital in Scutari is still vivid and terrible, but it is Jean’s descriptions of Florence as a determined young woman who has chosen to take on the enormous task of running a hospital for soldiers wounded in the Crimean War that brings Florence to life. Jean, like the other 37 young women chosen by Florence to be the nurses who accompany her to Turkey, has no idea of the chaos, the insanitary conditions, the sickness, and the dreadful death toll they will encounter when they arrive.

‘Miss N was thirty-four years old. Jean was twenty-four.’ On the journey by boat and train to Scutari, the girls get to know Miss Nightingale a little and what she expects of them:

As a nurse, Jean was to obey Miss N in everything, including caring for each soldier no matter his religion. No proselytising. A chaplain could be summoned for that sort of comfort. A curious thing, Jean thought, for a woman who so loved God to want her nurses to stay quiet on the matter.

When Miss N describes her childhood, the house with ‘vast lawns, countless servants, endless parties’, and her ‘trips to Egypt and Germany and Greece’, Jean can hardly imagine it, but she is awed by Miss N’s learning, and very envious. In Jean’s own home, money had been scarce. She had needed to tell a ‘little lie’ to get the job as governess to Anna and four-year-old Benjamin in the Turners’ grand house, and she has never fully recovered from Benjamin’s death from scarlet fever when he was in her care. ‘Things were alive and then they were not. Jean was about to face this again in Turkey, this and more.’

On the way to Scutari, Florence and her nurses stop in Marseilles so that Miss N can meet a man from the War Office who will tell her about conditions and routines at the hospital. Jean and two other nurses accompany her to this meeting in a café and Jean marvels at ‘Miss N’s breeding, her comfort, her ease at speaking French’. The man they meet is Sergeant Silas Bradley.

Jean is mesmerised by this handsome man, and each time she looks up as they sit at the café table, she sees his eyes on her, ‘as though he were waiting’. Which indeed he is. As they leave, he asks her if she will meet him later that afternoon for another cup of coffee, and he tells her where he will be. Jean is not sure she can get away but when Miss N develops a sudden fever and is briefly confined to bed, she and the other girls see a chance to explore the city.

They could write home and say they’d been here – they would need something to say they’d done or seen or eaten or kissed. (That was Catherine’s joke. Not a woman among them thought Miss N would stand for that. In this way Miss N was like a spinster aunt, though not yet thirty-five years old herself.)

Jean does meet Silas, and their mutual attraction is so strong that they don’t want to part – he for London, Jean for Scutari. Inevitably they sleep together. ‘Please be safe,’ he tells her. ‘When we’re both back home,’ she says, ‘come and find me,’ and she gives him the address of the boarding house where she had been living after leaving the Turners’. What neither expect is that they will meet again in the operating theatre in Scutari.

Jean has boldly, and with Miss N’s tacit approval, started to stay and watch the surgeons operating, hoping, as Florence does, to learn from them. One junior surgeon seems to like Jean and does not send her away but lets her get close as he works, and even lets her help in small ways. It is while she is doing this that Silas is brought in on a stretcher.

‘The same sort of blood-soaked shirt Jean had observed on other troops was now on Silas.’ She tells Miss N, who has also been watching quietly, that this is the gentleman they had met in Marseilles, and she is allowed to stay and speak to him, and he to her. Their words are of love and hope. What Jean does when the surgeon opens Silas’s chest and she sees fluid near his heart, however, and what she does later in a terrifying visit to the morgue, result in her dismissal.

Back in Florence’s Mayfair home, Silas has been banished from Florence’s bedside by Mabel for seeming to cause her distress. When Mabel returns to her chores after settling Silas in a chair to sleep, he sneaks back to Florence’s bedroom.

Slumped down outside her bedroom door, he pleads: ‘Miss Nightingale? Please listen. What did Jean do to me?’ Mabel comes past and from her bed Miss Nightingale calls for her:

‘Come in,’ Mabel says. ‘She says to come in.’

I sit up. ‘Will you stay?’

Mabel shakes her head. ‘Miss Nightingale says just you. She doesn’t have a lot of time.’

 Florence rouses enough from her mental wanderings to recognise him and, at last, he has his answer.

The final chapters of Nightingale are moving and beautifully written. Jean’s life of learning in Crimea and, after her return to London, Silas’s long search for her, and Florence’s memory of what happened when Jean intervened in the surgery, are resolved into an ending in which Jean, Silas, Florence, and even Mabel, each in their own way, find peace.

Nightingale is a remarkable novel. Laura Elvery’s deep feeling for her characters, the skill with which she conjures them onto her pages, the way she reclaims the history they live through, and the ghostly puzzle at the heart of the book, make this a compelling and intriguing story.

Laura Elvery Nightingale University of Queensland Press 2025 PB 228pp $32.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Australian writers, Crimean War, Florence Nightingale, historical fiction, Laura | Elvery, nursing, Scutari