Prelude Audiobook

About the novel

In the spring of 1854 seventeen-year-old Adeline Elizabeth Hoe began to keep a daily diary.  Filled with six months of the details of a young girl’s life, the diary 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.  Author Helen Davidson, a descendent of Adeline, transcribed the diary with her husband, Richard Davidson.  Helen wrote the novel Prelude, while transcribing the diary, re-imagining the life of this spirited young girl.

The novel commences in the spring before Adeline’s eighteenth birthday when she and her older sister Emilie travel to summer destinations in the countryside.  Addies was the second daughter of the famed inventor and manufacturer Richard March Hoe, whose “Lightning” printing press had become widely used in the US and beyond.  One of the visitors to the Hoe household noted in the diary, abolitionist Joe Stewart, takes a central role in the novel.  As his confidante, Adeline becomes aware of the atmosphere of antebellum opposition to slavery and begins herself to espouse Abolitionist sentiment, the closer she gets to the mysterious Joe.

The novel was published by Peter E. Randall, Publisher, Portsmouth, NH

About the author

A lifelong music teacher, choral director, dramatist and writer, Helen Taylor Davidson is the custodian of many heirlooms in a family whose American roots stem from the early 1600s.  These include her ancestor’s diary.  The Davidsons live in Plainfield, NH in the home where Helen was raised.

This podcast is made possible in part by the guidance and technical support of JAM.  American traditional “Ash Grove” theme music performed and recorded by Anne Hoe Davidson and Miri Lucksinger.