The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, And War in the Nineteenth Century

by Hodes, Martha Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9780393052664
• ISBN10: 0393052664
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-09-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

"When award-winning historian Martha Hodes came upon a collection of family letters, she decided to write the story of Eunice Connolly, an ordinary American woman who led an extraordinary life." "Born white and poor in New England, Eunice worked in the cotton mills and married a carpenter. But a sojourn to the Deep South on the eve of the Civil War left her caught in a divided nation - and in between the men of her own family who fought on opposite sides of the cataclysmic national conflict. Back north, living in near-poverty and fighting off depression, Eunice tried as best she could to follow the conventions of nineteenth-century womanhood, but she would take those conventions only so far. After the war, Eunice, now a widow and the mother of two, fell in love across the color line and chose to make a new home for herself on a faraway West Indian island." "In her travels between New England and the Deep South, and then to the Cayman Islands, Eunice faced despair and loss, romance and serenity, and ultimately profound transformation in her journey from a working-class white woman to a genteel lady in an elite family of color." "Eunice told her story in the letters she wrote - whether by candlelight after an arduous day scrubbing laundry in the raw New England winter or resting under the shade of a coconut tree on a bright Caribbean morning. Following every lead in the family papers, Hodes traced Eunice's footsteps, searched the archives, studied the landscape, and met descendants along the way."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Martha Hodes is a professor of history at New York University.

Table of Contents

The Family of Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly	p. 10
Three Notes to the Reader	p. 13
A Story and a History	p. 17
A Carpenter's Wife	p. 39
Yankee in the Deep South	p. 79
Servant and Washerwoman	p. 119
From Widow to Bride	p. 161
The Sea Captain's Wife	p. 205
Hurricane	p. 243
Searching for Eunice	p. 275
Notes	p. 299
Essay on Sources	p. 339
Acknowledgments	p. 361
Permissions and Illustration Credits	p. 367
Index	p. 371
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