For some reason, I thought that Galileo’s Daughter was going to be about, well, Galileo’s daughter.

It isn’t.

It’s about Galileo, with an emphasis on his relationship with his oldest daughter, Sour Maria Celeste. (Sour = Sister, as in a nun) And it includes many excerpts from her letters to him over the course of her life.

Now, if I’d gone in expecting to be reading a biography of Galileo, I think I would have liked this book a great deal. But I thought it was going to be a biography of the daughter of a famous, and during his life, infamous scientist. So I kept waiting for it to get to the point.

That said, they had a very interesting relationship. Galileo had 3 children, all born out of wedlock. The older two were daughters, and both were sent to a convent run by the Sisters of St Clare when they were 11 & 13 years old. (The son was legitimized and named as heir at some point.) The "Poor Clares" are a cloistered order, so they never left after they formally joined the order at 16. In spite of that, Sour Maria Celeste was probably her father’s closest support, particularly during his trial during the inquisition. She was obviously intelligent and amazingly hardworking, and did everything in her power to provide for and help her father and her younger sister.

Anyway, if you are interested in Galileo, and an "intimate portrait" type memoir, you’ll probably enjoy this book. But it isn’t about his daughter, so if you wanted to learn about her, all you get is her-in-relationship-to-him. It’s interesting, but not what I was expecting.