Isabel Allende’s My Name is Emilia del Valle begins in the Mission District of San Francisco in the late nineteenth century and vividly evokes life among ‘that multicolored, polyglot multitude of emigrants’.

Written in the style of European novels of the Victorian period, the story is related by a reliable first-person narrator, interspersed with factual news articles that provide additional historical and political context. Telling the story in its ‘proper order to avoid confusion’, Emilia begins her account with the story of her mother, Molly Walsh, a pious novice nun whose future calling was ruined when she was seduced by a young Chilean aristocrat in an encounter described as ‘barely consensual’.