The Hearth and Eagle

Hesper Honeywood grows up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, beneath the sign of the Hearth and Eagle, the inn her family has maintained for generations. Stories of the Honeywood women who survived the colony’s early hardships shape her expectations, but Hesper longs to escape the fishing town and the narrow futures available to its daughters.

Her life carries the family story through the Underground Railroad, the American Civil War, industrial expansion and Marblehead’s decline as a working port. Love, widowhood, financial ruin and responsibility repeatedly draw Hesper back to the inn, where she discovers that the endurance she once dismissed in her female ancestors is the source of her own independence.