The Daguerreotype: A Novel

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The Life of a Woman in Victorian England was fraught with social restrictions and professional obstacles. And so Elizabeth Gow, young and ambitious, gives up the prospect of a teaching position at a fashionable London seminary to accompany her widowed father to America. All hope vanishes as she boards the ship that will carry her to an uncertain future -- first in Philadelphia and then in the Midwest where she marries, raises a family, and struggles to adjust her Old World ...
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More About This Book

Overview

The Life of a Woman in Victorian England was fraught with social restrictions and professional obstacles. And so Elizabeth Gow, young and ambitious, gives up the prospect of a teaching position at a fashionable London seminary to accompany her widowed father to America. All hope vanishes as she boards the ship that will carry her to an uncertain future -- first in Philadelphia and then in the Midwest where she marries, raises a family, and struggles to adjust her Old World ideals and aspirations to a harsh new reality.

With a keen sense of time and place, Patrick Gregory takes Elizabeth from unsure girl on unfamiliar soil to resilient matriarch. The poignancy of her story lies in its commonality, with its youthful hopes and soaring ambitions, followed by disillusionment and unexpected turns of fate. If Elizabeth's life ends in obscurity, it nonetheless acquires a certain nobility through her persistent efforts to wrest meaning from her experiences.

In its broad sweep and old-fashioned realism, this novel harks back to Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson. Yet its voice and its vision are distinctly of our time.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Elizabeth Gow's dream of being a self-sufficient schoolmistress is dashed when her biologist father moves them from London to the Pennsylvania wilds to lecture at the new state university in The Daguerreotype, Patrick Gregory's debut novel. As the disappointments and compromises of adulthood erode her youthful hopes, Elizabeth stoically reconciles herself to life's uncertain course. Although Gregory ably renders his heroine's Victorian sensibilities, the novel plods sluggishly through Elizabeth's coming of age, then speeds through her middle years to her death. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The adventures and travails of a young Victorian lady who moves to America with her father. The daughter of a distinguished British naturalist, Elizabeth Gow lost her mother at a young age and thereafter became utterly devoted to her father, managing his household and studying his experiments with equal care. When Dr. Gow is passed over for a university appointment, he concludes that his prospects are better in America; in 1851, he and Elizabeth set sail for Philadelphia. There, he finds himself once more the victim of academic intrigues and is robbed of a post at the University of Pennsylvania; but when the newly formed University of Wisconsin invites him to join the faculty at Madison, he and Elizabeth head west and settle in what is still essentially a frontier town. Despite the hardships, Elizabeth is content in her new world and begins to feel at home, until her father's sudden death leaves her stranded and almost penniless. A talented musician, she ekes out a precarious living in Milwaukee as a piano teacher and eventually marries William Macready, a considerably older Irish engineer she met on the ocean crossing. Successful but feckless, Macready gives Elizabeth several happy years of marriage and two healthy sons before his business fails. She takes the boys back to Madison and raises them on her own, leaving Macready to his fate. Distant, self-contained, and taciturn, Elizabeth is in many ways a highly unlikable heroine, but her account offers an unusual perspective on American history and life. She dies in Iowa many years later, in a country vastly different from the one she came to. These final chapters have the air of an afterthought, lacking the detail and depth of the storyas a whole; the narrative gives the impression of having been begun in leisure and finished in haste. An honorable failure: a first novel written with great precision, understatement, and a measure of grace, but oddly truncated.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780815608257
  • Publisher: Syracuse University Press
  • Publication date: 4/28/2004
  • Pages: 256
  • Product dimensions: 6.34 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 0.92 (d)

Table of Contents

Prologue: London, 1849 1
London, 1850 4
Mid-Atlantic, 1851 24
Philadelphia, 1851 55
Madison, 1852 84
Madison, 1853 105
Milwaukee, 1854 136
Milwaukee, 1857 162
Madison, 1863 187
Clarksville, Iowa, 1929 215
Epilogue: New York City, 1942 237
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