Five Things about Elanora

Chloe Grace Moretz has the perfect face to be Elanora, with her sweet American girl beauty reflecting both innocence and intelligence – just how I imagine Elanora might have looked.  It sounds like young Chloe is well-protected by her family, with one brother working as her manager and the other as her acting coach.  That is a secure ring of caring Elanora never had.  I see her retaining her air of bewildered innocence till the day she died. 

So the question is, would Elanora have eventually fitted into post Gold Rush California, if she’d had longer to get used to her new world?
What do you think?

Five things you might not know about Elanora.

1. Pania reflects at one point in Poisoned Legacy that Elanora never settled in California – she was too much the sheltered Easterner – and Graysie responds defensively: “She’d have got used to California. She hadn’t lived here long enough to settle. Graysie sighed and gazed into Pania’s dark eyes. “Things might have been different if she’d had longer to learn the ropes. It wasn’t her fault she was in that stage coach when it crashed.” Pania hesitated and then said in a low, quiet voice: “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
2. There is no doubt Elanora was the love of Rafael’s life, but he was forced to leave her in San Francisco with the children while he fulfilled photography commissions to feed his family.  And I don’t really think Elanora ever really grasped why she was left behind. She  retained her air of bewildered innocence till the day she died – never a fully matured woman able to express her nascent talent.
3. By contrast, Elanora’s early death forced her daughter Graysie to become wise far beyond her years. But Graysie had a pragmatic resilience which was quite different from her mother’s winsome nature.  Maybe she benefitted from some of her strong Aunt Glory’s genes in there somewhere. An Aunt she never knew.
4. Elanora had a beautiful singing voice – which she passed on to Graysie – but her need for social status made it impossible for her to perform in public and she never did anything with it.
5. Elanora adored her children, something that becomes clear when an old photograph turns up in Double Jeopardy.