The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. By Martha Hodes. (New York: Norton, 2006. 384 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-393-05266-4.)

Abstract

In The Sea Captain's Wife, Martha Hodes, an especially accomplished storyteller, has given us a carefully researched, cleverly conceived, and beautifully written book. Focusing her attention on Eunice Connolly, a New Englander who anyone would describe as an ordinary woman, Hodes offers a remarkably complex biography of a woman who should have fallen through the cracks of history. According to Hodes, Eunice was born of white and free parents in New England in 1831. Since her parents were among the working class that failed to find upward mobility, Eunice found herself in the ranks of women entering the region's textile mills. In 1849, she married a man of her own class, a carpenter, and quit the mills to assume her role as wife and homemaker. Yet, within the next decade, Eunice and family suffered from the separation and dislocation fostered by factory life. Her husband deserted her for life in the South, and she became so impoverished she was forced to board her children and re-enter the mills. Yet even then she had not reached the bottom.