Geraldine celebrates the pioneering and often turbulent years of a twentieth century woman scientist from Victoria, B.C. through her life as a bio-chemist in Europe and North America. In that sense it is a tribute to feminists of an era when they had to struggle unceasingly to make their way in an implacably man’s world. Such a journey, both to seek recognition beyond gender, and to fight an obdurate patriarchy in her elected world of medical science, was to strengthen an innate feistiness and leave inevitable scars. Such are not always endearing or remotely attractive. But it was a price that Geraldine and her generation of women warriors were quite prepared to pay. But this is more than a case of history. More than one man’s tribute to what he has witnessed in his own lifetime. It is a novelist’s portrait of a remarkable and singular woman, her role as mother and grandmother, and her anguish at senescence dimming recognition of her achievements and the humiliation of being regarded as just a snobbish and crazy old woman.

Naturalized Canadian, David Watmough, 81, has been shaped and nourished by a Cornish background, several years in London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco. All his novels, short stories, plays and poems, however, have been written on Canada’s west coast during the past 45 years. Geraldine is his eighteenth book and thirteenth of fiction.