PRELUDE: A JAM Audiobook Chapters 1-4

PRELUDE, A NOVEL, a JAM audiobook

Read by the author, Helen Taylor Davidson

Based on the 1854 Diary of Adeline Elizabeth Hoe

Edited by Richard Davidson and Helen Taylor Davidson

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 March 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.

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.

Content advisory:  This audiobook content includes racial terminology derived from the era of the 1854 diary on which it was based.