Prelude, A Novel

& The 1854 Diary of Adeline Elizabeth Hoe

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Prelude, A Novel & The 1854 Diary of Adeline Elizabeth Hoe


Prelude, A NovelA book in two parts, Prelude, A Novel and The 1854 Diary of Adeline Elizabeth Hoe combine research and interpolation in a genealogical study that casts new light upon the interior lives of young women in nineteenth-century America. The book began with Adeline’s brittle, faded diary, inherited by Helen Davidson, a direct descendent. Through years of painstaking research, Helen and Richard Davidson transcribed and annotated the diary and brought the teenage Adeline, daughter of a famous nineteenth-century inventor and industrialist Richard March Hoe, back to life. Family friends, and visitors to her father, included William Sidney Mount, noted as the first American painter to accurately depict African-American life; William Batchelder Bradbury, the NYC choral director and founder of the Bradbury Piano Company; and Robert Nunns, also of piano-making fame. The Davidsons’ poignant footnotes explain the diary’s enigmatic references to the events and culture of Adeline’s day.
 

Adeline Elizabeth Hoe

Adeline Elizabeth Hoe daguerreotype, 1854.

The result of Helen’s continuing quest to understand her heritage, Prelude, A Novel, is a captivating thriller about the Underground Railroad inspired by the Davidsons’ research into Adeline’s life and times as revealed through her own writing. The title Prelude refers to the piano’s central role in upper-class 1850s social life, the passage to adulthood documented in a teenage girl’s most intimate recollections, and, especially, to the undertones of secession that already dominated 1850s America. Davidson recreates the social milieu of Adeline around the most dramatic movement in the America in which she lived. In doing so, Davidson breaks new ground in showing how genealogy studies can be imbued with meaning as well as pride.

 
In the spring of 1854 a seventeen-year-old girl began to keep a daily diary. Filled with six months of the details of a young girl’s life, the diary itself offers a wonderful window into the mind of an educated young woman from a well-to-do family living in Lower Manhattan in the turbulent decade before the Civil War. Her meticulous record of the elegant music, dances and literature she and her sister enjoyed is juxtaposed with her matter-of-fact relation of epidemics and sudden deaths, conveying a vivid picture of mid-nineteenth-century life.

Events

Sun. May 18, 2014, Lewisboro Library, South Salem, NY

Book signing and presentation Sunday, May 18, 2014 at 4pm, Lewisboro Library, 15 Main Street, South … [Read More...]

Mon. May 19, 2014, Three Village Historical Society, Setauket, NY

Book signing and presentation on Monday, May 19, 2014 at 7:00 PM at the Three Village Historical … [Read More...]

Reviews

“Imagining Adeline” Valley News

Imagining Adeline: Family Diary Inspires Plainfield Woman’s Novel "In 2009, Helen Taylor Davidson … [Read More...]

National Genealogical Society Quarterly Review

"Prelude is a unique combination of history and historical fiction. The six-month 1854 daily diary … [Read More...]

Knightengale Books Review

"The novel immediately draws you into 1854 New [York], with its horse-drawn carriages, steamboats, … [Read More...]

Midwest Book Review: “a choice addition to historical fiction…”

"Life in the nineteenth century was so very different to the world as we know it. Prelude, A Novel: … [Read More...]

Three Village Historical Society Review

"...The diary portrays an idyllic time in Stony Brook and Setauket [New York]. In 1854, farming was … [Read More...]

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