The Sea Captain’s Wife

A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

Published by W. W. Norton

The Sea Captain’s Wife brings readers into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice followed her first husband to the Deep South and soon found her relatives fighting on opposite sides of the Civil War. Back in New England, Eunice and her children struggled to get by—until Eunice fell in love with a well-to-do black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the British Caribbean. Tracking every lead in a collection of 500 family letters, Hodes retraced Eunice’s footsteps and met descendants along the way. The Sea Captain’s Wife takes up grand themes of American history—war, racism, freedom—and along the way illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past.

Reviews

“Few researchers have the imagination or tenacity to reconstruct a lost life as carefully as Hodes has done. . . . an absorbing account of a life reclaimed from obscurity.”
—Times Literary Supplement, London

“I felt as if I were about to open a box of treasure.” Hodes “pieces together a fascinating story.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“The story is fascinating . . . . a rewarding and absorbing read.”
—The Times, London, online

“Hodes is the rare scholar who can present historical research for mainstream readers.” The story “comes surprisingly, and movingly, alive.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Hodes’s prose. . . is lucid and her account is engaging.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Hodes delicately unwraps papers left by Eunice Connolly, a mid-19th-century New England working-class woman who led the kind of life usually lost to history.”
—Best Books of the Year, Library Journal

A “gem of historical writing and research.” Hodes “has produced another outstanding work showing the complexities of 19th-century racism. . . . The compelling story and graceful writing will appeal to general readers who enjoy American history.”
—Library Journal, starred review
 
“Recognized for honorable mention by the Lincoln Prize judges is The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race and War in the Nineteenth Century, by New York University history professor Martha Hodes. She has done an extraordinary job of writing the story of an ordinary New England woman who was a prolific letter writer and who made unusual decisions for her time. . . . The author does a masterful job of interweaving and layering the quotations with observations of the times and the places where Connolly lived.”
—Washington Post

Selection, Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, Quality Paperback Book Club.

Finalist, Lincoln Book Prize, Civil War Institute and Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.