Martha Hodes

Hodes is a historian, and it feels slightly unfair to expect her to be anything else. However, for me this book felt a bit too much "under the hood," i.e. exposing the methods of a historian investigating something that happened long ago. In this case, of course, the thing that happened happened to her, but she barely remembers her hijacking. So she tells us, over and over.

It was an interesting story, one that, were Hodes a novelist, would have been better served by making it a novel, backed by her historical investigations (much like the Wager).… (altro)

I thoroughly enjoyed this biographical history based on an archive of about 500 letters from the 1850s to 1880s in the Lois Wright Richardson Davis papers at Duke University. Most of the letters were written to Lois, but about a fifth of them are from her daughter Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly, the "sea captain's wife" that the book is about.

Eunice's story is fascinating, and with historian Martha Hodes' meticulous research, it comes alive. Born in 1831 and living her early years in mill towns in New Hampshire, she marries a carpenter, William Stone, at age 18, and works in the mills to help make ends meet. William follows Eunice's sister and brother-in-law to Mobile, Alabama, in search of better opportunities, and Eunice and their young son Clarence join them in late 1860, just before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Unlike the in-laws, the Stones are not economically successful in the South, but William joins the Confederate army with his brother-in-law anyway. A pregnant Eunice returns to New England with Clarence in December 1861, and spends the next eight years as a servant and washerwoman, learning that her husband died in a hospital near the end of the war.

Somehow (Eunice is with her family and this doesn't write letters), Eunice meets a wealthy Afro-Caribbean mixed-race sea captain from Grand Cayman named William Smiley Connolly, and marries him in November 1869. Soon after, they and Eunice's two children from Stone move to Grand Cayman, where Eunice's economic status is vastly improved. She and Smiley have two daughters (but lose Clarence), but the family dies in a hurricane at sea in 1877.

Hodes goes on to tell what happened to the rest of Eunice's family of origin, as well as to the descendants of Smiley Connolly from his first marriage. For me, the most interesting chapter was the last one, where Hodes details her research process and how she searched for more information about Eunice and her family

Maps and a list of family members at the front of the book, photographs and other illustrations throughout, and extensive (40 pages) endnotes, an essay on sources (22 pages), acknowledgments, permissions and illustration credits, and a 13-page index round out this excellent nonfiction.… (altro)