Florence Nightingale is often described as the founder of modern nursing. She was immortalised in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1857 poem, Santa Filomena: “A noble type of good / Heroic Womanhood.” For over a century, she has been remembered as “the lady with the lamp”, moving through the wards of war hospitals.

In Laura Elvery’s debut novel, Nightingale, she is something else entirely. She is not the symbol, but the woman – not solely the caregiver, but a patient, child and sister. It opens with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This idea of seeing the familiar in a new light mirrors the novel’s structure and spirit. Nightingale is not a linear biography, nor a detailed account of Nightingale’s public accomplishments. It is a quiet meditation on memory, and on care and the ways it marks a life.

Review: Nightingale – Laura Elvery (UQP)

The novel is told in three parts across two timelines. It opens in Mayfair, London, in 1910. Florence is 90, frail and close to death. Her housekeeper, Mabel, watches over her as she drifts between moments of lucidity and memories of her past. The figure who once helped to transform military hospitals........

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