Daughter of Fortune

Eliza Sommers, adopted as an infant by a British trading family in Valparaíso, falls for Joaquín Andieta, a clerk with revolutionary sympathies and ambitions of striking it rich in California's gold fields, and when he leaves without her, she stows away on a ship bound for San Francisco, disguised as a boy after miscarrying the child she was carrying during the crossing. Allende spends the first half of the novel building Eliza's proper, constrained upbringing in careful, almost suffocating detail specifically so the disguise and the journey that follow read as a genuine rupture rather than an adventure lightly undertaken, a woman using the one tool, invisibility as a boy, available to a woman with no other legal claim to independent movement.

Tao Chi'en, a Chinese physician Eliza meets aboard ship and who becomes her protector, translator between worlds, and eventual life partner, gives the novel its widest lens on the Gold Rush's actual population, immigrant labor from China alongside Chileans, Mexicans, and Americans all chasing the same rumor of quick wealth in a territory none of them controls. Allende uses his medical training and his own experience of dispossession, sold into indentured service as a boy in China, to counter the Gold Rush's usual mythology of self-made American opportunity with a much more crowded, exploited, and international picture of who actually built California's early economy.

Eliza spends most of the novel disguised, mobile, and searching, first for Joaquín, later simply for a life she can recognize as her own, and Allende structures that long middle section so the initial romantic motive quietly recedes without ever being formally abandoned. By the time real information about Joaquín's fate surfaces late in the book, Eliza has already built an identity, competence, and set of relationships that don't depend on finding him, and Allende lets that shift stand as the novel's actual argument, that the freedom Eliza gains chasing a man turns out to matter more, and last longer, than the man himself ever could have.