Daughter of Fortune

Daughter of Fortune Review

Daughter of Fortune was published in 1999 and demonstrates the range Allende had developed in the sixteen years since The House of the Spirits. Where that first novel was rooted in a single place and a multi-generational arc, Daughter of Fortune is continental — beginning in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1843 and ending in Gold Rush California, covering two decades and two entirely different societies in a structure that borrows from the adventure novel and the picaresque.

Eliza Sommers is the illegitimate ward of English merchants in Valparaíso, raised between Chilean society and British propriety, fluent in the rules of both worlds and fully at home in neither. When her Chilean lover joins the rush to California in 1849, she follows him, hiding in a ship’s cargo hold and disguising herself as a man once she arrives. The lover — vain, impractical, and ultimately unworthy of the pursuit — is the novel’s pretext rather than its subject. The novel’s actual subject is what California in 1849 was: a society assembled from scratch, without history or hierarchy, by every nationality and race available, organised around a single shared delusion and the violence it produced.

Allende’s Gold Rush California is one of the most vivid historical settings in her fiction — a world where Chilean merchants, Chinese cooks, Mexican gamblers, and Anglo adventurers coexisted and competed with an energy that the more settled East Coast of the same period had lost. The Chinese community is rendered with particular care, especially through the figure of Tao Chi’en, the ship’s doctor who becomes Eliza’s companion and eventually her love. Their relationship — across language, culture, and the disguise Eliza maintains for much of the novel — is the book’s emotional centre and its most successful invention.

What Daughter of Fortune demonstrates, beyond the pleasure of its historical world-building, is that Allende is capable of structural adventure as well as emotional depth. The picaresque allows her to range more widely than her more controlled novels permit, and she uses the freedom well.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Allende’s most adventurous novel in structure and setting — a historical picaresque with considerable energy and a vivid portrait of Gold Rush California.

Two Continents, Two Selves

Published in 1999, Daughter of Fortune demonstrates the range Allende had acquired in the sixteen years since her debut. Where The House of the Spirits was rooted in a single place across a multigenerational span, this novel is continental and propulsive — beginning in Valparaíso, Chile, in the 1840s and carrying its heroine to Gold Rush California, traversing two decades and two utterly different societies in a structure borrowed from the adventure novel and the picaresque. Eliza Sommers, the illegitimate ward of English merchants, is raised between Chilean society and British propriety, fluent in the codes of both and fully at home in neither, and this double positioning prepares her for the larger displacement to come. When her feckless Chilean lover joins the rush to California in 1849, Eliza stows away after him and, once arrived, disguises herself as a man to travel freely. The pursuit of the lover is the novel’s pretext rather than its subject; what the journey actually accomplishes is the discovery of a self.

The Most Diverse Society of Its Century

Allende’s Gold Rush California is among the most vivid historical settings in her fiction, and one of its real achievements is its insistence on the genuine diversity of that world. The California of 1849 was a society assembled from scratch, without inherited history or hierarchy, by every nationality and race the era could supply — Chilean merchants, Chinese cooks, Mexican gamblers, Anglo adventurers — all organised around a single shared delusion and the violence it generated. This is not the story usually told about the period, and Allende tells it with energy and density. The Chinese community receives particular care through the figure of Tao Chi’en, the ship’s doctor who becomes Eliza’s companion and ultimately her love, and whose relationship with her — across language, culture, and the disguise she maintains for much of the novel — forms the book’s emotional centre and its most successful invention.

Disguise, Freedom, and Fortune

The novel’s recurring concern is the relationship between disguise and liberation. Eliza becomes a man not as a stunt but as a practical necessity, and the necessity is itself a statement about what freedom required of a woman in the nineteenth century: to move unaccompanied through that world at all, she had to cease, outwardly, to be a woman. Her independence and her gradual indifference to the lover she set out to find trace a clear arc from pursuit to self-possession. The title’s meaning shifts as the novel proceeds — fortune, it turns out, is not the gold the prospectors chase but the self Eliza assembles along the way. The novel is not flawless: the Chilean opening takes longer to engage than the California material, some of the historical set pieces feel researched rather than fully inhabited, and the original lover dwindles in interest beside the journey away from him. But the picaresque form gives Allende a tonal range her more controlled novels do not permit, and she uses the freedom well, producing her most adventurous book in both structure and setting.

The Shifting Meaning of Fortune

The title of Daughter of Fortune turns out to be a question the novel gradually answers. Eliza sets out chasing one fortune — the lover gone to the goldfields, and behind him the gold itself — and discovers along the way that the fortune that matters is the self she assembles in pursuit of him. Her disguise as a man, adopted out of necessity, becomes a statement about what freedom actually demanded of a nineteenth-century woman: to move through that world unaccompanied at all, she had to cease, outwardly, to be one. As her indifference to the unworthy lover grows, the arc from pursuit to self-possession becomes the real subject, and the gold the prospectors kill for reveals itself as the least valuable thing in the book. Fortune, the novel quietly insists, is not what you find in the ground but what you become while looking for it.