Footnotes No Longer

By R.Z. Sheppard

After two generations of women's studies, the pickings are getting slim. All the major and most of the minor figures, from Pandora to Paglia, have been covered. But the gender genie is out of the bottle, and locating yet another of history's unsung females is now a mainstream imperative.

The phenomenon is influencing historical fiction. Even men are catching on to the imaginative possibilities. Earlier this year Ron Hansen dug deep for Hitler's Niece, a novel that cast the teenage Geli Rabaul as Lolita to the Fuhrer's Humbert Humbert.

That tour de force was followed by Sena Naslund's Ahab's Wife, in which young Una Spencer goes to sea disguised as a boy and eventually encounters Melville's legendary whaling captain. Marriage and a child follow before Ahab goes off to chase Moby Dick and Una becomes a freethinker, abolitionist and, in time, Ishmael's significant other.

The final months of the year (the century!, the millennium!) bring us Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter (Walker; 418 pages; $27) and Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune (HarperCollins; 432 pages; $26). Each in its way projects a feminist point of view. More strikingly, both are about revolutions, one scientific, the other cultural.

Longitude, Sobel's previous nonfiction narrative, was a concise and intellectually tense retelling of the beginning of modern navigation. It was also one of the surprise publishing successes of 1995. Her new book adds a little-known personal dimension to the life of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century Pisan mathematician and astronomer who was tried, convicted and humbled for challenging church dogma that placed the earth at the center of the universe.

His daughter Virginia is an unusual candidate for feminist sainthood. She was the first of Galileo's illegitimate children, born to his Venetian mistress Marina Gamba. Virginia and her younger sister had no social standing and no marital future. They were cloistered at the Convent of San Matteo, located near Galileo's home in the outskirts of Florence. A son, Vincenzio, frittered away his youth and musical talent before settling down to raise a family.

Locked away from the world (and, it should be noted, the dangers of childbirth and the bubonic plague), Virginia became Sister Maria Celeste. She served the church and the man she addressed in her letters as "Most Illustrious Lord Father." Her surviving correspondence, translated and smoothly integrated by Sobel, ranges from heretical observations of the heavens to the mundane details of housekeeping.

The latter included doing laundry and mending for her father, as well as providing him with medicinal compounds. Maria Celeste was the convent's herbalist and, judging from her elegantly phrased appeals to her well-connected father, also the impoverished order's chief fund raiser. She was a shrewd manager of the convent's money and kept an eye on her father's house and vineyard. One busy nun.

"She alone of Galileo's three children mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility," Sobel writes. Yet remarkable as she was, Galileo's daughter revolves sedately around her father, whose triumphs and persecutions are recounted by Sobel with grace and power.

By contrast, Isabel Allende's Eliza Sommers runs circles around everyone else in Daughter of Fortune. Allende, raised in Chile and currently residing in California, is probably the most widely read Latin American woman novelist ever published. She transfers a variation of this distinction to Eliza, who breaks every rule of 19th century Valparaiso society to seek her callow lover in gold-crazed California.

This novel has pretensions, but they are overridden by Allende's riproaring girl's adventure story. In fact, the book exemplifies the new feminist approach by plugging late 20th century cultural attitudes into a spacious 19th century literary vehicle. Like Una Spencer, Eliza Sommers makes her way in the world by cross-dressing. She befriends a Chinese healer who becomes her confidant, her partner in an alternative-medicine practice and eventually her soul mate for life. Throughout it all, Allende projects a woman's point of view with confidence, control and an expansive definition of romance as a fact of life. In this book and Sobel's, history is not only revised but also enthusiastically refurnished.

--By R.Z. Sheppard