I wasn't so sure about this novel at first, but it grew on me...very quickly. My initial concerns with a seemingly formulaic storyline – young woman escapes humble origins, gets a taste of big city opportunity, but gives it up for a family crisis – were eclipsed by the far more intellectual and complex ins and outs of the characters and plot.
Set at and during the 1895 opening of Biltmore, the vast and magnificent Vanderbilt estate and now historic house museum, and its environs near Asheville, North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is partly a study of the haves, the ultra-rich Gilded Age captains of industry, and the have-nots, the poverty-stricken Scots-Irish people of Appalachia who struggled to survive on small farms and in traditional industries.
In addition to the class and social conflicts between those two groups, it is also a commentary on the tensions between the overall dominant "white" Anglo-Nordic population of late nineteenth-century America, and the enormous influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe – the Russian Jews, Southern Italians and others – from its height in the late 1880s and 1890s until legislation in 1920 by a reactionary U.S. Congress slammed shut the Golden Door of immigration for decades. At the same time, freed former African-American slaves were trying to make their way in a society that was using mistrust and prejudice to foil them with the extreme violence of the KKK and other White Supremacy groups, and the Jim Crow laws that arose in the American South to combat the freedoms that had been granted by Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution. In addition, Chinese immigrants were suffering under the 1875 Page Act which banned Chinese women from immigrating and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which completely prohibited further immigration of all Chinese laborers. In short, in many aspects, America was a far-from-welcoming place.
The major fictional characters, Kerry MacGregor, the young mountain woman who goes to New York with a scholarship at Barnard College, but returns to care for her sick father and join the staff at Biltmore, Salvatore Catalfamo, an Italian immigrant who comes to work at the Biltmore stables, Lilli Barthélemy (note the play on Edith Wharton's Lily Bart in The House of Mirth), are deftly woven with the historic ones, including George Washington Vanderbilt II, the owner of Biltmore and Madison Grant (who widely promoted the false science of eugenics in his book The Passing of the Great Race but was at the same time an early wildlife conservationist). A full range of secondary characters, authentic or invented but plausible, along with the majors, wind together in an intricate plot that involves two murders, romance, suicide, death by alcoholism, and a Pinkerton manhunt. All this happens while the author also emphasizes her overwhelming appreciation of the beauty of the natural surroundings and the magnificence of Biltmore in lyrical description.
The historical aspects are beautifully presented and feel natural in the context of the action. Readers may feel motivated to learn more about the architecture and construction of Biltmore and the social and financial concerns that continue to haunt Appalachia. As to the plot, all the threads are neatly tied by the novel's end, which concludes with a satisfying romantic touch. Under a Gilded Moon is most definitely a "good read".
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