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Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende
Announced February 17, 2000
About the Book
Isabel
Allende's Daughter of Fortune — her first work of fiction
in six years — is a rich and spirited historical novel. Set
at the exciting midpoint of the Nineteenth Century, and spanning
four continents, this eagerly awaited novel, translated from the
Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden, brims with Allende's characteristic
magic and once again proves that this beloved novelist can "hold
the world spellbound with her tales" (Miami Herald).
The Daughter
of Fortune is Eliza Sommers, a young Chilean girl of mysterious
origins. Left as a baby on the doorstep of the Sommers, an English
family living in Valparaiso, she is adopted by the spinster Rose
Sommers and raised to be a proper English lady. But an equally strong
childhood influence is Mama Fresia, the Sommers' Indian servant,
at whose apron strings Eliza learns the culinary and medicinal secrets
of an ancient culture–secrets that will serve her well as the
adventure of her life unfolds.
When she is
not yet sixteen, Eliza falls in love with Joaquin Andieta, a poor
yet terribly proud underling at her uncle Jeremy's British Import
and Export Company. Knowing that Rose has set her sights on a more
socially exalted marriage of Eliza, the girl conducts her love affair
on the sly. When Joaquin announces he must journey to California
to make his fortune in the gold rush, Eliza agrees to wait for this
return. But, two months after his departure, she discovers she is
pregnant with his child.
Eliza
knows that the only solution to her predicament is to follow Joaquin
to California–hardly an easy feat for a respectable girl with
no money. With the help of a Chinese cook, Eliza stows away on a
northbound ship. The sea voyage alone nearly kills her, and only
through the ministrations of Tao Chi'en, the Chinese cook who is
really an accomplished physician, does she survive both a miscarriage
and the passage. Somewhat unwillingly Tao Chi'en becomes her protector
when they reach San Francisco, and the friendship they forge will
prove the only sure footing in each of their shifting destinies.
Once in California, Eliza, disguised as a boy, sets off the find
Joaquin. Her search leads her into the dangerous and daring world
along the mother lode, and introduces her to a life unimaginable
during her sheltered Chilean girlhood. Tao Chi'en, too, witnesses
the brutality and promise of the Golden Mountain, his future irrevocably
altered by the coarse reality of this imperfect new world.
Characters surface and resurface, reinventing themselves to accommodate
the exigencies of life. Crossed paths and missed opportunities abound,
as the inextricable fortunes of Allende's vividly portrayed cast
play out history. Indeed, in Daughter of Fortune Allende brings
a stirring immediacy to history, and once again validates the appraisal
that she is "one of the most important novelists to emerge from
Latin American in the past decade" (Boston Globe).
Learn more about Daughter of Fortune
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