DAUGHTERS OF THE NEW WORLD, by Susan Richards Shreve, Doubleday, 471 pages, $20.

Often in a family saga two forces reign — the proverbial sins of one generation being visited upon the next, and a profusion of historical detail that drowns out the vitality of the characters.

Neither is the case in Susan Shreve’s eighth novel. She has succeeded in chronicling the lives of five generations of women while letting the history fall, like a mural, behind the women’s lives. The result is literature, not a supermarket historical saga.

“Daughters of the New World” has the crisp dialogue and fast pace of her seventh novel, “Country of Strangers,” set in the 1940s; the playfulness of the metaphorical “Queen of Hearts”; and the expansive, yet manageable plot of a previous generational saga, “Miracle Play,” which was well received when it came out 11 years ago.

Shreve has won many awards for her fiction. Most, if not all, of her books have been on The New York Times Best Seller List. “Daughters of the New World” has been chosen as a Book of the Month Club Selection; her seventh novel, “Country of Strangers,” was chosen for the Quality Paperback Book Club and was made into a movie.

“Daughters of the New World” opens in 1890 when Anna Jermyn, then 16 and emigrating to America, throws herself over the body of her mother, Maria, who died just before the ship reached the New York harbor. Anna insists that she be buried in the new land rather than being thrown into the sea, as was the custom. The book ends in 1990 when Amanda and her granddaughters, Anna’s great-granddaughters, are putting together a book of photographs which signify epiphanies in the five generations of women. They title the album “Daughters of the New World.”

The women are Anna, who came of age as a pioneer woman at the turn of the century; her daughter, Amanda, who disguised herself as a man and became a battle photographer in World War I; Amanda’s daughter, Sara, the most conventional, who came of age in the 1940s; Sara’s daughter, Eleanor, a social activist during the 1960s; and her two daughters, Lily and Kat, who are coming of age at the end of the novel.

The characters are linked by the brave voice of Anna Jermyn, who left a packet of letters she had written in diary form to the mother she had buried in the New World. The power of these turn-of-the-century letters is in their inspiration. In addition to running a clinic on the frontier, Anna coped with an unstable husband, and the loss of her mother, her homeland and her beloved son. Writing to her dead mother gave Anna a sense of power. In turn, Amanda draws sustenance from reading the letters. She carries them with her always, and even has them taped after she loses her sight.

Late in life, and late in the novel, Amanda reads to her granddaughter, Eleanor, a letter that her mother, Anna, wrote to Maria in 1897. In the letter Anna had written that she wished Maria could see where she was in her life. Anna then asked a question that harked back to the 19th century and their homeland: “Do I exist, I sometimes wonder, if you cannot see me?” Grasping the letter Amanda triumphantly says, “We are the image of our mother’s perfect dreams.”

But those dreams are not perfect. Amanda is not a rosy idealist with an ideal of total fulfillment; these characters, though not without some measure of economic security, are constantly aware of life’s darker waters. They are hard-working women, forever determined to find justice for themselves and their families, and to work for a greater good. Witness the chronology: Anna’s clinic on the Indian reservation, Amanda’s many photo-essays of America, Sara’s expansive WASP-Jewish intellectual household, Eleanor’s program for disadvantaged children.

Maria, the mother who died on the ship, had divulged one last confidence: that she had secretly loved to dance — in an empty church, no less — at a time when good women could not. Did her daughter Anna, seeing how her mother had been so locked in by convention, develop a vision so strong that it carried over into succeeding generations?

Eleanor’s daughters, now coming of age in the ’90s, have much to choose from as they design their own history: the power and sustenance in the letters of their pioneer grandmother, in the family picture book, and in the panoramic flow of the century depicted in their grandmother’s many published photographic studies.

“Daughters of the New World” is certainly Shreve’s most ambitious novel, and more uplifting than her previous generational saga, “Miracle Play,” in which the characters were held together more by their disasters than their triumphs.

Connections are most important in this novel. No matter how much a daughter may be different from her mother in temperament and inclination, there is always the determination to do right for one’s family and for society in general. The women stand up for their beliefs.

If one had to scrounge around for flaws there seem to be a few abrupt jumps out of one time into the next, but I’m not sure whether when I felt jolted I was not just sorry I couldn’t have found out a little more before I went on. Perhaps a pragmatist might question the amazing mobility of Flat Mouth, Amanda’s lifelong lover. But where’s the fun if you let yourself wonder if Amanda’s liaison with Flat Mouth is unrealistic, or if Eleanor’s 1960s arrangement with Tom Clay is too risky for a woman who is otherwise so sensible?

This is Shreve’s best novel so far — elegantly plotted, gracefully written, and moving. My only disappointment at the end was that I wanted to stay with the characters for a longer time.

Emilie C. Harting is a Philadelphia college English professor and an author of books and articles on literary figures.