Nightingale

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So, I have recently joined a real book club - as in I am soon to attend a meeting with a bunch of people I have never met in which we discuss a book that I would probably have never picked up and read under my own power. I have just closed the cover of said book and figure, what better to why to try and decipher what I think about it than writing my own review? The book: Nightingale by Laura Elvery, a debut novel.

Mayfair 1910: Aged and frail at the age of 90, Florence Nightingale is no longer of sound mind. After a celebrated career as a nurse, writer, statistician and female pioneer, she now lives as a recluse: bed bound and constantly haunted by memories of lovely and tragic times from her past. One night she is visited by a young man named Silas Bradley who claims that they have met before, during the Crimean War. The encounter forces Florence to recall a most trying time, traumatic even, as well as try to remember a strange and ambitious nurse named Jean Frawley.

Part historical fiction and part ghost story, Nightingale is the first novel from Australian author Laura Elvery. It’s a dramatic exploration into the final days of a great, but considerably undercelebrated historic figure that explores themes of memory, gender roles, the horrors of war, and the way in which even the most adventurous life can go in a circle.

Narratively, it’s both an easy and challenging book to read. It’s easy in that Elvery’s prose is simple and sensual, using tangible sense words to create the scenes and implant the reader right in the middle of them. I was able to bang this out in two days: through its language, it’s a book that instantly envelopes the reader and inspires the constant flipping of pages. But it’s challenging too in the narrative techniques Elvery uses to tell the current story and ones from the past. There is a fair amount of time jumping, made easier to grasp as each new section in time is pronounced in a chapter title or letterhead. We then have the different points of view in which the novel is written. We have the chapters written as the aged Miss Nightingale, contents of which are already to be taken with a grain of salt as the blurb hints that this is an unreliable narrator. Elvery is cleverly playing with this technique, making us think longer and harder about it as we know that the interactions that Florence has during these scenes may well be in her own mind, while at the same time her interior monologues might be the closest thing we get to clarity with her. We then have the chapters in the voice of Silas. These threw a spanner in the works for me, as it’s through Silas’ character that the ‘ghost story’ part of the novel comes in to play, but this is merely an idea that is hinted at and then made murky in the way that Silas is described, his interactions with other characters besides Florence, and the timeline that we are given. The middle of the book then jumps back in time and speaks in the voice of the omniscient narrator, recounting the encounters between the central triangle of Florence, Silas, and Jean.

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Elvery’s sensual language works to smooth the jaggedness created by the character POV break-ups and it’s during the middle part of the book that we get to see the real and ‘historical’ part of the novel, as this is where the character of Florence Nightingale, as the world saw her, is depicted. A woman with ambition, who took the gender roles assigned to her by time and society and made them bigger, broader, heavier…sigh, only to have the men who created her workload blame her for the everything that was and became wrong with it. The Florence we see is inspiring and patient, a stoic matron.

While I don’t know if I would read this book again, I was certainly entertained and challenged by it. It’s transportive, inspiring, engaging, and thought-provoking: a brilliant debut novel.

Author: Laura Elvery, 2025

Published: University of Queensland Press (UQP), 2025