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. ( )

I picked this up because it was something written by a woman with some link to the Cayman Islands. I was surprised to find a really moving account of a working woman's life around the time of the American Civil War and her search for happiness, told primarily through letters to her family. Her story is wrapped in insightful analysis from Martha Hodes on the time's social attitudes, illuminating her own, and her family's, choices.

I found The Sea Captain's Wife an interesting angle on a key part of American history, but what really made the book for me was Eunice's letters. Despite the huge differences between our nationality, class and education level, I felt her words speak to me down the years with gut-wrenching clarity. I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone with an interest in women and their lives in society.

A stellar combination of genealogy and history, well-written and including a scrupulous account of how the author conducted her research -- a must-read for anyone with even a passing interest in either. Unlike many widely ballyhooed books that slide from nonfiction into fiction, this one is solidly documented and rooted in historical knowledge -- and it still reads like a novel. You don't have to make stuff up to tell a great story! ( )

The title is deceptively racy, but I found this true story of a Northern working-class woman’s life both riveting and heart-wrenching. Told almost entirely through a recounting of her extensive letters to her family, with some editorial analysis added, this tale of a poor white girl who ultimately found happiness with a black merchant from the Cayman Islands was like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. This true story of Eunice Connolly’s drudgery in utter poverty, her heart-breaking struggles with single parenthood (after being widowed) and her transformation into a woman of means and position was fascinating and at times so sad that it brought tears to my eyes. ( )