In Mayfair 1910, Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, a famous trainer of nurses and inspiring comforter of wounded and dying soldiers in the Crimean War is 90 years old. She has spent most of her life in bed after the war, unwell in body and mind.
She speaks in first person from her bed describing rescue stories in her childhood: the owl she saved; her dolls that share their bed with an injured hare; nursing the family’s sick servants, all make her feel sure of her divine destiny.
Now, ghosts of soldiers at night come through her walls. She still wants to comfort them. But a young soldier Silas, one of her dying patients in the Crimean War, is the first one that knocks on the door. How can this be? Their conversations by her bed of past events address these unsolved mysteries and keep the pages turning.
Jean works with Nightingale in Crimea. She describes Nightingale as clever, commanding and praises her rigorous rules of fresh air and cleanliness within the nightmare of injuries and deaths they endured.
The lives of Jean, Silas and Nightingale are linked by war and by a suppressed love affair. But drastic events splinter their relationships.
Elvery explores the fragile line between life and death. Nightingale is dying and her vivid dreams take her back in time, like a flowing river, multiple lives inside her compete for her attention. Her internal dialogue reveals her post-traumatic stress. Elvery shows empathy for this and for Nightingale’s desire to hold the Lamp again – to be young and decisive.
The mystery of Silas has an unexpected and haunting end. This novel made Nightingale and her brave nurses come alive for me.
Reviewed by Judith Grace
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura is the author of Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter, which won the 2021 Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection. Laura’s short fiction and essays have been published in Meanjin, Overland, The Saturday Paper, Island, Australian Financial Review and Griffith Review. She has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Fair Australia Prize for Fiction. Laura has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies from QUT. She lives in Brisbane. Nightingale was published in 2025.
In 2021, Laura was the inaugural Writer in Residence at the Centre for Critical and Creative Writing at UQ. In 2022, Ordinary Matter was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award.
0 Comments