Sea Captains Wife
A True Story of Love Race and War in the Nineteenth Century
WW Norton · Print & ebook · August 28, 2007
A finalist for the Lincoln Prize, The Sea Captain's Wife "comes surprisingly, and movingly, alive" (Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly).
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- Who it’s for
- A grave, readable history with domestic tension and the larger pressures of race and war.
- Genres
- Lives in History, 19th-Century America, Women's Lives
- Published
- WW Norton, August 28, 2007
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For younger readers: Passenger on the Pearl, Turn Homeward, Hannalee, Freedom on the Sea
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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.
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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. A Library Journal Best Book of the Year and a selection of the Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, and Quality Paperback Book Club.
Quietly Compelling
A grave, readable history with domestic tension and the larger pressures of race and war.
Come here for
- serious historical register
- a true-story premise that invites slow reading
Expect
- narrative history with a literary feel
- works as both sustained read and daily dip-in
Where it sits
| Women's Lives | 59% |
|---|---|
| 19th-Century America | 52% |
| Lives in History | 37% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- History
- Authors
- Martha Hodes
- Publisher
- WW Norton
- Published
- August 28, 2007
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- History