The name’s John Taylor. I work the garish streets of the Nightside—the hidden heart of London where it’s always three A.M., where in human creatures and otherworldly gods walk side by side in the endless darkness of the soul. I have a talent for finding things. People…property…no problem. But now I’m after something different. A local diva called the Nightingale has cut herself off from her family and friends, and I’ve been hired to find out the reason. I’m also wondering why her suicide—prone fans think she has a voice to die for. Literally. To get the truth, I’ll have to lend an ear to the most enticingly beautiful and deadly voice in all of the Nightside—and survive.

The poetic nightingale is so familiar it seems hardly to merit serious attention. Yet its ubiquity is significant, suggesting associations with erotic love, pathos and art that cross culture and history. This book examines the different nightingales of European literature, starting with the Greek myth of Philomela, the raped girl, silenced by having her tongue cut out, and then transformed into the bird whose name means poet, poetry and nightingale simultaneously. Moving from the classical to the Christian worlds, Jeni Williams discusses nightingales and nature in the early church and sees the emergence of the figure as an emotive emblem of the aristocracy in mediaeval vernacular debate poetry. Her final chapters use the nightingale and the myth to examine Elizabeth Barrett Browning's struggle for an active female voice in Victorian poetry.

The only generic and diachronic study of learned and popular lament and its socio-cultural contexts throughout Greek tradition in which a great diversity of sources are integrated to offer a comprehensive and penetrating synthesis.