Shedding light on The Lady of the Lamp
The founder of modern-day nursing Florence Nightingale is reimagined in a compelling and daring new novel by Laura Elvery.
Laura Elvery has a strong reputation for crafting fiction that references real-life women. Her USQ Steele Rudd Award winner Ordinary Matter is a collection of short stories loosely inspired by the 20 women scientists who have won the Nobel Peace Prize since its inception in 1901.
Similarly, her debut novel is not a chronological and factual treatise about Florence Nightingale’s contribution as a social influencer, statistician, writer and the founder of modern nursing.
Instead, the Queensland author storytelling is impressionistic, surreal. It’s a searing reflection of the repercussions of the Crimean War and the Victorian era’s rigid class system, its stifling morality, colonialism and the gendered predicaments arising from the strictly defined roles of men and women.
The detailing of the routine disregard for women skills, compassion and stoicism beyond wifedom and motherhood chafes the senses. A soldier on leave is dismissive: “Women can’t imagine that sort of suffering.”
The narrative is scaffolded around three characters. At 90 or so years of age Nightingale is at home, seriously ill and in the throes of dementia. The legendary yet frail figure, disoriented and close to death, trips in and out of consciousness, sliding between past and present.
She inhabits a dream world, an otherworldly, beautifully observed realm troubled by scrambled recollection. She’s haunted by deceased soldiers who materialise through the ceiling or the walls.
“I am smiling, my fingers on the balustrade, somehow satisfied with the life that, yes, I really did live while I witnessed eye sockets like eggless nests, shattered jaws, the skin on the cheeks of a dehydrated man.”
Nightingale’s memories reveal the harrowing realities she encountered at Scutari Military Hospital, Istanbul – then Constantinople – as Superintendent of Female Nursing. The intolerable, unsanitary conditions with inadequate supplies caused more soldiers to die from infection than battle-inflicted wounds.
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Nightingale witnessed the deaths of 3000 men. The relentless suffering and mortality rates caused many to turn to alcohol.
Despite extreme hardships, the nurses were expected to adhere to the strictest of moral codes. Affection and intimacy between a nurse and patient was a fast track to dismissal.
Someone knocking on Nightingale’s door is a rare occurrence. She has lived as a recluse for many years. Silas Bradley professes to know her. Is he an apparition? Why has he come? Is Bradley yet another figment of her splintering mind?
Bradley speaks in riddles. “I am twenty-seven but I am also eighty-three. I have no children. I’ve lived two lives and yet a full life has quite escaped me.” He presses her for information about Jean Frawley, a nursing colleague Nightingale had respected.
Unlike Nightingale, the highly competent Frawley is working-class. She has no influential contacts, private wealth or any support other than Nightingale’s. Frawley is blindsided when Bradley, who she has strong feelings for, and about whom she has fantasised she might share a life with despite the briefest of intimacies (a source of escapism perhaps) arrives at Scutari. Bradley is dying. A deep gash runs along his left side. Frawley oversteps in a bid to save him with devastating consequences.
Nightingale is deeply compelling. An unusual and worthy read
The graphic dissection of the horrors and indignities the soldiers endure and how they even reach the hospital alive after a tortuous journey, forces the reader to inhabit a miserable world, to flinch at the amputations, the pitiful deaths. “Whimpering men lay on stuffed sacks over every side of the corridor, keeping company with the rats, the roaches, the maggots … Lice, thick as snow, swarmed over men’s scalps.”
Vividly drawn, Nightingale’s hallucinatory existence and the pendulum swings of the timeline can also be confusing. Not genre specific, this novel doesn’t conform to historical or romantic fiction. It’s original, poetic. A fascinating spin on war, love and survival examined through three intriguing perspectives.
If the reader can revel in the exquisite imagery, sharp observation and imaginative power then the occasional blurring of narrative direction can be overlooked. On balance, Nightingale is deeply compelling. An unusual and worthy read.
Nightingale by Laura Elvery, UQP. $32.99