Born in 1866, Emilia del Valle Claro is brought up by poor but hard working parents in San Francisco’s Mission District. She is determined to escape the expectations of a woman of her time and class, and starts to write popular crime novels under the name of Brandon J Price. Using the same male identity she writes a crime report for the local newspaper and manages to persuade the editor to commission regular articles from her. A task that is facilitated by her contacts in the poorer part of the city.
But there is a second strand to Emilia’s life. Her father is not the much-loved man who raised her, but a Chilean aristocrat who seduced and then abandoned her mother. She is brought up simultaneously to despise Gonzalo Andrés del Valle and to believe that she is owed an inheritance from him.
When civil war breaks out in Chile Emilia endeavours to secure a commission to report it for her newspaper. This becomes a way to satisfy both her lust for adventure and her curiosity about her Chilean relations.
The novel follows the twists and turns of Emilia’s life, some more probable than others. We see her travelling to New York and then to war torn Chile, where she spends some time on the front line with government troops, and then helping in a military hospital. At a time when women’s lives were heavily circumscribed she takes frequent lovers and ventures into places where even hardened men would hesitate to go.
Emilia del Valle is the latest of Isabel Allende’s feisty and intrepid heroines, who appear so frequently that we have to wonder how far there is an autobiographical element. Certainly Allende’s firsthand knowledge of Chile and its political upheavals informs the novel, as does her more recent knowledge of the United States.
One of the pleasures of this book is the broad sweep of society. In both Chile and the United States we mingle with the poor and the dispossessed, the immigrants and the gold seekers, the soldiers and the labourers. In New York we meet pygmies in a sideshow, a spiritualist and an exotic dancer. But we also encounter nuns and priests, and mix freely with the very top echelons of Chilean society.
Emilia herself seems to move effortlessly through society. She is limited by her sex but this also gives her opportunities such as being able to talk freely to miners’ wives. This – together with her journalistic experience – enables her to give a birdseye commentary on late 19th century America and on the even greater extremes of wealth and class in Chile.
The result is a rich tapestry of one woman’s life and of the social, economic and political fabric of two countries at a particular point of time. A very enjoyable read.
My Name is Emilia del Valle, Isabel Allende (trans Frances Riddle), Bloomsbury, 2025, 9781526683359
