LITMIR.BIZ

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to contact her. Well, yeah. I do.

      And so I wrote this book — well, not this book, but one very much like it. The first manuscript I handed in was a rather perfunctory retelling of the facts: “And then in 1863, the family …,” that sort of thing. It was a fine book, and a thick book, a book packed with footnotes, but it was not the right book. With the blessing of my editor, Suzanna Tamminen (thanks, Suzanna!), I tore back into it. I do not know if anyone else will ever take a stab at Isabella. I only know I had this one shot, and if I wrote a boring book, I’d deserve a visit from the grave from an angry shade who was never, ever boring.

      I still don’t know if I’ve done justice to Isabella. I only know I tried.

      For all the time I’ve spent with her journals, her speeches, and her letters, Isabella seems to me to be the closest thing we have to a modern woman. With her worries about juggling home-time and me-time and work-time, she would have fit in well today. Though society was telling her to settle for less, she wanted it all, and she wanted it all at once. She was prickly and difficult to like sometimes, but in the time I have spent plumbing her depths, I have been confused sometimes, and frustrated at others, but I have never been bored. I do not expect anyone to search through my own letters and journals, but if they do, my fondest wish is that they’d be every bit as delighted as I have been with Isabella.

      About the use of first names: the Beechers were fond of naming their children after one another. There is an abundance of Lymans and Thomases and Harriets and several derivations of Isabella. When appropriate, I refer to them by their first names — and, if necessary for identification, their middle or last names. Some of the letters contain misspellings, or abbreviations. As much as possible, I have retained the original spellings, and I haven’t inserted a note when something is misspelled. I am in no way Isabella’s editor. I wouldn’t want to tell her — even a long-dead her — a thing about how to get her point across. Misspellings and abbreviations aside, I prefer to let Isabella Beecher Hooker speak for herself.

      In addition to the encouragement and editing I got from Suzanna, I could not have written this without the support of Joan D. Hedrick, and Debby Applegate, who wrote The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, the Pulitzer Prize winner for biography in 2007. It is a daunting thing to have two Pulitzer-winning biographies at your elbow as you make your own attempt at pinning down a Beecher. Early on, Joan offered to meet and chat and listen to my fumbling attempts to contain a life within a book. When I contacted her about Isabella, Debby (I’d never met her, but I hounded her electronically, so I felt I’d earned the right to call her by her first name) said she had a few notes she hadn’t used in her book about Henry Ward Beecher, and then she sent me some two hundred pages’ worth. And then, when I lost those notes, she sent them again, and apologized for not having placed them in chronological order. Sisterhood is not dead. It’s alive and well and living among Pulitzer-winning authors who have a lot on their plate but cheerfully offered to help me pick through mine.

      I must thank, as well, Katherine Kane, executive director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, who was supportive and encouraging from the first moment — and Elizabeth Burgess, collections manager/goddess of research, who managed to say precisely the right thing every time I wandered in, dazed but convinced I would never be able to do this woman justice, no matter how many pages I wrote. And of course, thank you to Valerie and Kathy. Valerie, if you hadn’t had the idea in the first place, I’d have never met Isabella, and then what would my obsession have been?

      Thank you, as well, to my husband, Frank Schiavone, who has endured years of Isabella-inspired non sequiturs. We’d be walking around a village and come across a house marked by a dated commemorative plaque (a common thing in New England), and I’d volunteer that that, 1853, was the same year the Hookers finished their Hartford mansion. I have worked Isabella into conversations about stir-fry, tire balancing, and trees. Perhaps you can imagine the restraint it takes to politely listen to years of this. Frank finally suggested I write a book in the hopes that I’d stop talking about Isabella already. That has not turned out to be the case, but I appreciate the encouragement, and appreciate even more having found my very own John Hooker — patient, steadfast, and fiery in his convictions, all at once.

      And finally — and I admit this is odd — I want to thank Isabella herself. As difficult as it is for women to defy cultural norms today, it was harder then. A woman who said “No, thank you” to bone corsets that made teeny-tiny waists to inhabit teeny-tiny lives could lose everything.

      Yet Isabella did it anyway, and even when it was clear the world could not quite catch up with her on this side of the grave, she never stopped pushing. How can you not love a woman like that?

THE FABULOUS BEECHERS

THE CHILDREN OF JOHN HOOKER AND ISABELLA BEECHER HOOKER

       Created by the author with substantial input from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, Connecticut

       Tempest-Tossed

      1

      THE WORLD THAT AWAITED BELLE

      Understanding Isabella Beecher Hooker means first understanding her family — the large, dynamic New England Beecher clan. Isabella was born in 1822, the first child of her father’s second wife, with eight older half-siblings to welcome her. Her father was the noted early American minister Lyman Beecher, and her siblings included a world-famous author, a world-famous minister, and an internationally recognized advocate for women’s education. “Lyman Beecher,” wrote one biographer, “gave us queens as well as kings among men.”¹

      Certainly he held an unparalleled position of authority in early-1800s America. From a 1904 biography: “Perhaps no one during the first half of the nineteenth century was more closely connected with the better life of America, both in its religious and in its reformatory aspects.”²

      If Lyman Beecher had not existed, someone would have invented him. He was thunderous in the pulpit, and rough-hewn away from it. Even though his children did not cleave to his brand of fundamentalist theology, they worshipped him for all his charismatic, sometimes coarse ways. But at his core, Lyman was a storyteller, and one of his favorite stories involved his own birth. How he came to this story one can only guess, as one can only guess if it’s accurate. But it’s a good story.

      As so often happened with marrying men in the 1700s, Lyman’s father, a blacksmith named David, was widowed and married five times — to Mary Austin, Lydia Morris, Esther Lyman, Elizabeth Hoadly, and Mary Lewis Elliott. He had twelve children with his wives, though eight of the children died in infancy. This, too, was common in a time of infant mortality that ranged, depending on the year and location, from 10 to 30 percent.³ Lyman, born October 12, 1775, in Guilford, Connecticut, was the product of David’s third and best-loved wife, Esther. She was from Middletown, Connecticut, and of Scottish descent. She possessed, said her son, “a joyous, sparkling, hopeful temperament.”⁴

      This characterization is conjecture on his part, or it is a description based on information gathered from his relatives. Lyman Beecher was born in the seventh month of his mother’s pregnancy, and she died of consumption — the “great white plague”— two days after his birth.⁵ Her illness had weakened her to the point that the midwives had little hope for the baby, and, wrote Beecher, wrapped his tiny body and laid him aside to die, until one of the women attending his mother thought to check him, and found him alive. She cleaned him and properly ushered him into the world.

      “So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold in this world,” Lyman wrote.⁶ That early brush with death — or, at least, the family stories he heard about it — helped set Lyman Beecher on the road to a lifetime of conquering — starting with his weak infant

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