This is "small history" at its best; the kind of work that explores and illuminates major historical questions by telling a tightly focused story about an "ordinary" person doing her best to make her life endurable in the face of conditions over which she has very little control. Eunice Connolly, a poor white New Englander, came of age on the eve of the Civil War. Her first marriage provided little if any love or support and she was left a young widow with two children at the war's end. Hovering near the edge of abject poverty Eunice nearly succumbed to rising depression as her existence came to revolve around brutal, demeaning work, loneliness verging on isolation, and the absence of any hope for improvement. But her life changed completely when she fell in love with a kind, hard working, and successful sea captain. However, her decision to marry this man required that she take the bold step of abandoning her family and moving a world away to the Cayman Islands. And the fact that Captain Connolly was a man of color made her decision more than bold; to racist 19th century whites it might be called many things...few of which could be considered complimentary. Martha Hodes tells Eunice Connoly's story without resorting to Dickensian imagery or contrived sentimentality. Instead Hodes displays marvelous historian-as-detective skills in studying the letters of Eunice and her family and an enormous array of other primary and secondary sources. The result is a brilliant portrait of someone doing the best that she could in an era that offered few options. And the writing is superb. I found it nearly impossible to put down and the issues raised (either deliberately or efffortlessly inferred) still persist in my mind and stir my imagination. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

Martha Hodes, a professor of history at New York University, is the author of White Women, Black Men, which won the Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction. She lives in New York City and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

A finalist for the Lincoln Prize, The Sea Captain's Wife "comes surprisingly, and movingly, alive" (Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly).

Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice moved from countryside to factory city, worked in the mills, then followed her husband to the Deep South. When the Civil War came, Eunice's brothers joined the Union army while her husband fought and died for the Confederacy. Back in New England, a widow and the mother of two, Eunice barely got by as a washerwoman, struggling with crushing depression. Four years later, she fell in love with a black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the West Indies. Following every lead in a collection of 500 family letters, Hodes traced Eunice's footsteps and met descendants along the way. This story of misfortune and defiance takes up grand themes of American history—opportunity and racism, war and freedom—and illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past. 47 illustrations.

Publisher: W. W. Norton
Distributor: W. W. Norton
Publication Date: 09-17-2007
Pages: 384
Measurements: 8in X 6in