the occasional grey remains of a cottage, almost greened over.” And all she tastes is peat from the fire her food is cooked in, imagining that “if she did stay the full fortnight, she’d have consumed a good handful of boggy soil”. This is a landscape steeped in “the enigmatic atmosphere of stone circles, ring forts or round barrows”, but all Lib sees is ugliness and morbidity: “flat fields striped with dark foliage. Such surveillance is required because, since the day of her 11th birthday, Anna is said to have consumed nothing but sips of water. Lib’s only duty “will be to watch her” for a period of two weeks, in a schedule of eight-hour shifts shared with a surly nun from the House of Mercy in Tullamore. She has been summoned by a committee of “important men” on behalf of the O’Donnell family’s only daughter, Anna, who is “not exactly ill” the doctor says.

It isn’t until Lib has been deposited in a pub-come-grocers-come-undertakers-come-guesthouse in a village outside Athlone that the bizarre nature of her assignment is outlined by the local doctor. Those who returned to Britain in the conflict’s aftermath brought with them a certain repute.Įmma Donoghue’s new novel spotlights one such “Nightingale”: Elizabeth “Lib” Wright, a young widow working in a hospital in London, who is singled out to travel to the Irish midlands on a well-paid but somewhat obscure commission. During the Crimean War, the Lady with the Lamp trained these women in her pioneering nursing practices. In reality, she travelled to Constantinople in 1854 flanked by a 38-strong team of volunteer nurses. We often picture Florence Nightingale as a lonesome figure, stalking hospital corridors with only a glow of light for assistance.

The wonder novel emma donoghue