Fire by Night by Lynn N. Austin

First published: Minneapolis, Minn.: Bethany House, 2003

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Historical fiction (nineteenth century); romance

Core issue(s): African Americans; charity; compassion; fear; selfishness; service

Principal characters

• Julia Hoffman, the beautiful young daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia judge
• The Reverend Nathaniel Greene, an idealistic young minister with whom Julia is infatuated
• Phoebe “Ike” Bigelow, a tall, horsefaced West Virginia orphan
• Ted Wilson, nineteen-year-old quadroon and Union Army enlistee
• Dr. James McGrath, a blunt and irascible U.S. Army surgeon

Overview

Fire by Night is the second book in Lynn N. Austin’s Refiner’s Fire series of books about young women around the time of the Civil War. The first, Candle in the Darkness (2002), which dealt with the daughter of a slaveholding family, and Fire by Night both won Christy Awards. The final work in the series, A Light to My Path (2004) featured a story about a slave girl.

In Fire by Night, lovely but headstrong young Julia Hoffman rides to Bull Run, Virginia, in July, 1861, with her congressman uncle and young minister Nathaniel Greene to watch the battle. When their carriage is surrounded by wounded soldiers pleading for help, Julia is shocked and repelled, and orders her uncle to take her home. The next day, after overhearing Greene describe her as spoiled and shallow, Julia begins to reexamine her life of social events and servants. Moody and discontented, she begins to do charity work and is inspired by Greene’s plea for volunteer battlefield nurses. Despite parental disapproval, she goes to Washington to apply for a nursing job but is rejected.

Determined to win Greene’s admiration, she applies at the hospital of renegade surgeon James McGrath. McGrath assigns her the menial job of laundress, whereupon she decides to go home. However, she runs into some former slaves and employs them to work for her in the laundry. When a measles epidemic strikes the hospital, Julia is pressed into service as a nurse. A young soldier dies in her arms, and she feels God’s approval for the first time in her life. She decides to stay at the hospital, pretending to be married because single women are not allowed to be nurses.

Meanwhile, in West Virginia, tall and homely Phoebe Bigelow, orphaned and raised by brothers who have gone off to war, decides to become a soldier herself rather than endure life as a domestic servant. She goes to Pennsylvania and enlists in the Union Army as Ike Bigelow. She makes friends with Ted Wilson, another recruit, with whom she bunks and secretly falls in love. During training, she fights off bullies, and her sergeant discovers she is a crack shot. Phoebe’s outfit marches to Yorktown, where she shoots a Rebel sniper and fights in a battle. Although she hates fighting, she decides to stay in the army to be with Ted.

Julia, now accepted as a nurse, volunteers in a hospital ship and sails to Richmond, where thousands of dying soldiers overwhelm her. A fellow nurse who is a nun tells her to pray constantly for strength, which she does, and she is able to help some of the patients. Greene discovers her and is filled with admiration, but she finds that his approval is no longer her goal: She now wants her life to matter. The nun tells her that with God’s love, every task will matter. The odious Dr. McGrath is rude and insulting, but he teaches Julia how to dress wounds. She thinks he is an alcoholic and hears rumors that he killed a man in Philadelphia.

Phoebe and Ted fight in several battles but keep retreating from Richmond. When Phoebe contracts malaria, Ted discovers she is a woman and will not have anything more to do with her. During a blast, she throws herself over him and saves his life. She is seriously wounded and taken to a field hospital. There McGrath finds that she is female and puts her in Julia’s tent. Phoebe wants to die because she feels that no one cares about her and she misses Ted, but Julia convinces her that Jesus cared enough to die for her. Julia gives Phoebe some women’s clothing and sends her home after her recovery, but she has nowhere to go. Phoebe discovers that McGrath secretly doctors slum dwellers in Washington in the evenings and offers to help him. He trains her as a nurse and takes her with him as an assistant on his next battlefield assignment.

Nursing at Fredericksburg with McGrath, Julia discovers that the doctor has migraines, not hangovers, and finds herself falling in love with him. After a kiss, both are appalled, each thinking the other is married. So Julia, who is now being courted by Greene, returns to her socialite life in Philadelphia. She accepts Greene’s proposal, but her fiancé opposes her working as a nurse. Julia tries to accept this but feels discontented giving parties instead of relieving suffering.

Phoebe goes with McGrath to Gettysburg, where they attend to soldiers from Phoebe’s old regiment. She explains to the doctor that she has found love, peace, and forgiveness through God. Phoebe finds Ted, badly wounded. McGrath has to amputate his leg. Julia appears, having answered the call for more war nurses because she could not stand the trivial life in Philadelphia. She confesses to McGrath that she is not married. When this becomes known, Julia is abducted by a teamster. Phoebe shoots the would-be rapist, saving Julia, but the teamster’s brother comes after Phoebe with a gun, bent on revenge. Ted throws himself in the bullet’s path, saving Phoebe. He tells her she is his best friend and then dies.

When the war ends, Phoebe returns Ted’s belongings to his mother and stays there for weeks. The two women learn to love each other. Back home again with her brothers, Phoebe encounters a former Confederate doctor whom she had met during the war, and he begins to court her. In Philadelphia, Julia prepares for marriage to the Reverend Greene but is distressed by his coldness. McGrath arrives at a party and wants to talk to Julia, but Greene throws him out. Julia goes looking for McGrath and finds him in the shantytown treating typhoid patients. She assists him throughout the night, whereupon he confesses that he is a widower and has been in love with her since they met. She also admits her love for him.

Christian Themes

Fire by Night’s title refers to the pillar of fire sent by the Lord to the wandering Israelites to give them light and guide them on their way. It also echoes the statement of Jesus in John 8:12 when he identifies himself as the light of the world who will give light to his followers. Austin depicts both heroines as initially dissatisfied with their lives and searching for a better way to live. When circumstances thrust them into danger and despair, each is able, through the advice and example of Christian disciples, to access that light and walk farther through the darkness than they had previously been able to do. Julia’s epiphany with regard to her feelings for Dr. McGrath occurs one night during a spectacular display of aurora borealis, which she interprets as a God-given portent to help the dying and exhausted patients and caregivers realize God’s love and awareness of their needs. Through that light, Phoebe is able to go on despite being alone and friendless, and Julia sees her way through a maze of deceptions and complications to become the kind of woman of whom God approves.

Austin shows that for both Julia and Phoebe, the way to happiness, love, and fulfillment lies in forgetting themselves in Christian service to others. Phoebe is able to endure the horrors of battle by focusing on helping Ted and winning the war so that Ted’s enslaved black relatives in the South will benefit. When wounded, Phoebe learns for the first time of God’s love for her and is able to find the strength to go on and to nurse others as a conduit for that love.

Julia begins her rebellion against her shallow life of pleasure and ease as a ploy to obtain Nathaniel Greene’s admiration but quickly discovers that helping suffering soldiers yields far deeper satisfactions than anything she has previously experienced. Through faith and prayer, her capacity for endurance and compassion expands far beyond previous limits, and after she has become enlarged by the grace of Christ, she finds it impossible to go back to the life she knew before. The new light by which she is guided pierces the handsome and charming exteriors of her beaus, exposing the Reverend Greene as essentially selfish and narrow, so that Julia can now be happy only with a man like McGrath, who, despite a gruff exterior, devotes himself wholly to relieving the suffering of the needy wherever they may be found.

Sources for Further Study

Butler, Tamara. Review of Fire by Night. Library Journal 128, no. 18 (November 1, 2003): 66. A synopsis of the plot and recommendation of the novel for library purchase.

Butler, Tamara. Review of A Light to My Path, by Lynn N. Austin. Library Journal 129, no. 18 (November 1, 2004): 68. This review examines the third book in Austin’s Refiner’s Fire series.

Byle, Ann. “Writer Coaxes Women to Hear God’s Calling.” The Grand Rapids Press, October 4, 2003, p. B2. In an interview with Christy Award-winning author Austin describes how she believes she followed God’s calling in becoming a writer.

Thorup, Shawna Saavedra. Review of Candle in the Darkness, by Lynn N. Austin. Library Journal 127, no. 18 (November 1, 2002): 71. A review of the first novel in Austin’s Refiner’s Fire series.