The Forge of Love

Raised as a subject in her father's experiment, Emilie escapes to London -- and forbidden knowledge.

THE ALCHEMIST'S DAUGHTER

A Novel

By Katharine McMahon

Crown. 338 pp. $23.95

At first glance, The Alchemist's Daughter is as spare and classic as a fairy tale -- "Rapunzel," say -- wherein a young woman is jealously guarded from the world by an overbearing father, only to fall for the first Mr. Wrong who shows up in tight doeskin pants and a curly wig. Sex and disaster ensue (don't they always?), and young Emilie Selden finds that knowledge is no substitute for experience. But Katharine McMahon packs a lot into this beautifully crafted historical novel: an engaging, accessible plot, lavishly furnished with period details and intriguing characters, and a fascinating look at the shift from the medievalism of alchemy (with its prayerlike repetitions and rituals) to the deductive logic of the scientific method.

Emilie's education is most unusual for a young woman in 1722. The sole offspring of a reclusive, wealthy widower, she's been raised in near-solitude in the English countryside, schooled in mathematics, natural philosophy and the arcane art of alchemy, to whose rituals her father clings, resisting the newer methods of scientific inquiry.

Determined to produce a flawless human being, Mr. Selden introduces Emilie to the real world by careful degrees, limiting her contact with all others. Enter Mr. Aislabie, colorful as a parrot and pulsating with sex, an adventurer posing as a scholar in hopes that Mr. Selden's discoveries can be profitable. The fairy tale becomes an ironic morality tale, and we begin to hear echoes not so much of "Rapunzel" as of Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter." Emilie's sexual expulsion from Eden is the direct result of her father's attempts to preserve her from the corruptions of the world; his efforts to build the perfect daughter explode in his face, like many of his alchemical experiments.

Loss of innocence, though, is a necessary step to the freedom of self-knowledge, and that leads eventually to the solution of Emilie's mysterious origins. I'm giving nothing away (this is a classic fairy tale) if I mention that Emilie does at last discover not only independence, the world and her own identity, but also the virtues of the sober and studious Mr. Right for whom the reader has been rooting since page 20. The real interest here, though, lies not in the eventual conclusion of the story but in the means of reaching it. Like Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter , a book with this sort of title forces examination of the single father. A daughter removed from feminine role models is a ticking time-bomb, and we're dealing with questions of nature vs. nurture, the necessary strictures of parental love, the hubris of viewing a child as a tabula rasa and the terrible error of living one's life through another.

Viewed as a whole, the story is a metaphor for the intellectual excursions of the early Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who would have been only 10 in 1722) does not appear in person, but McMahon cleverly uses his idea of the nobility of natural man vs. the corruptions of society as a central, if unstated, theme. However, McMahon comes to a different conclusion from Rousseau's: Emilie discovers her own morality only in the belly of the beast -- i.e., London -- when she accepts the necessary fellowship of humans and acknowledges her flaws as well as theirs.

One quibble: A late, brief exegesis on slavery, which was certainly a fact of the times, really has nothing to do with this story and seems inserted for the dual purpose of sullying the villain's character (in case unfaithfulness, business fraud, discarding a pregnant mistress and disregarding his wife's opinions weren't bad enough) and allowing the Book Club Discussion questions in the back of the book to gas on piously about moral blindness in a context where modern readers can smugly feel they have none.

McMahon writes a clear, sensual prose, filled with wit: "When the clock in the tower of St. M. and St. E. struck five," Emilie thinks, "I stood in the entrance porch to watch Aislabie go. I wanted to be sure. He might be careless and leave bits of himself about: a dimple on the landing, a satirical twinkle in the gaps between the flagstones. I wanted to be rid of him, a clean slate."

Emilie's idyllic -- though mysteriously motherless -- existence at Selden's Manor seems as fresh and green as the place itself, her exposure to the debased worlds of London a submersion in filth and confusion. She could easily be no more than the construct her father tries to make her, but McMahon is a better alchemist than that; Emilie may be a classic fairy-tale heroine on the surface, but this Sleeping Beauty has depth and an increasingly self-aware intelligence. ·

Diana Gabaldon's historical novels include "Outlander" and "A Breath of Snow and Ashes."