Preface

      WHY A BOOK ABOUT ISABELLA BEECHER HOOKER?

      There it is, on page 57 of Connecticut Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff, a book I cowrote with my friend Bill Heald some time back. Curiosities was a book about the interesting and weird things in Connecticut — a state not known for its frivolity — and that thin volume contained a short entry on Isabella Beecher Hooker, a complicated Hartford woman, written by me. In three snarky paragraphs, I called her “the more eccentric sister of author Harriet Beecher Stowe.” I dismissed decades of hard work in a parenthetical phrase: “Isabella, a suffragist, was also a spiritualist”— because Spiritualism is a grabber, and “suffragist” is not.

      It is not my best work.

      Like most every American child, I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I learned that Harriet Beecher Stowe opposed slavery, and that mid-1850s English is really hard to read. Beyond that, I knew nothing — not how disappointed some abolitionists were when Harriet pulled her punches and promoted colonization of freed slaves, not of Harriet’s illustrious family, not anything about her life and times other than that women wore hoopskirts and curls and the wealthier ones had fainting couches.

      I may have made up the fainting couches, but still.

      And then a little more than ten years ago, Valerie Finholm, a former colleague at the Hartford Courant, suggested three of us journalists explore Harriet and two of her sisters, Catharine and Isabella. I did not know Harriet even had sisters (there was a fourth, Mary, who was staunchly private), nor did I know Harriet was from a family once known as the Fabulous Beechers for their far-reaching influence in religion, in politics, in issues of the day such as abolition and women’s suffrage.

      Think the Kennedys, but bigger, said Valerie.

      I do not remember why I was assigned to Isabella, but Valerie began researching the older sister, Catharine, while another colleague, Kathy Megan, began researching Harriet. I felt sorry for them — Valerie, because she was writing about a woman I came to consider vaguely unlikable, and Kathy, because she was writing about someone who’d been written about to death — and quite well, actually. Connecticut’s own Joan D. Hedrick had already written a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Harriet in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life.

      It is hard to improve upon a Pulitzer.

      I figured I had the best of the three. If I hadn’t heard of Isabella Beecher, surely no one else had either and the possibilities were limitless. There’d be no ancient scholar calling from some dusty library correcting my characterization of this long-dead woman. Yay!

      But there was something more. As we made our way — individually and as a group —