The Daguerreotype

Library Bookwatch, Sept, 2004

The Daguerreotype

Patrick Gregory

Syracuse University Press

1600 Jamesville Avenue, Syracuse, New York, 13244-5160

081560825X $24.95 www.amazon.com

The Daguerreotype is an ambitious and engaging historical novel by Patrick Gregory which covers seventy years in the life of a woman, from her girlhood in a mid-19th century fashionable London seminary to her death on a remote Iowa farm at the outset of the Depression. The text is a controlled, careful prose that fully showcases the psychological ambiance of an era now gone as we follow the life adventures of Elizabeth Gow, who being young and ambitious gave up the prospect of a teaching position in England to accompany her widowed father to America and an uncertain future that takes her from Philadelphia to the Midwest where she marries, raises a family, and struggles to adjust her once youthful ideals and aspirations with the harsh realities of adult responsibilities. The Daguerreotype is thoroughly rewarding and erudite reading experience, one which will linger in the mind long after the book is set back upon the shelf.