Roxana Robinson / Dawson's Fall

Author Talk

Internationally Awarded Author Roxana Robinson Discusses Her New Book, Dawson's Fall

March 26, 2020

**The museum is closed to the public and this event will not take place on site. We are looking into options for delivering programs virtually. Status updates will be shared here and on our website. Stay tuned.**

Join the Harriet Beecher Stowe center as we welcome award-winning author Roxana Robinson as she discusses her latest novel, Dawson’s Fall, based on the lives of her great-grandparents.

Dawson’s Fall is a reconstruction-era novel that tells the complex story of her great grandparents and is fraught with issues that resonate today—violence, racism, sexual predation, and moral reckoning.

From the publisher: “In Dawson’s Fall, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape.”

Roxana Robinson, a direct descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe, is the author of ten books – six novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices.

Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland, and Spain. She is the recipient of many awards, the most recent the Barnes & Noble “Writers for Writers” Award, from Poets & Writers.

‟Robinson…has discovered a story with as much to do with America’s present as America’s past.”

– Bethanne Patrick, Washington Post

Location Harriet Beecher Stowe Center / Visitor Center / 77 Forest St. Hartford, CT

Doors Open 5:30 pm

Program 5:30 - 7:00 pm

School Group Interest Form

School Group Interest Form 2023

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Adult Group Interest Form

Group Tour Interest Form 2022

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Isabella Beecher Hooker

Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker (1822-1907)
An ardent member of the woman’s suffrage movement, Isabella Holmes Beecher Hooker joined in the cause along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Isabella was the first child of Lyman Beecher and his second wife, Harriet Porter Beecher.

Isabella began her education at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary and lived with her sister Mary Perkins. In 1841 she married John Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker, the founder of Hartford. John Hooker was a lawyer and an abolitionist.

In the early 1860s Isabella got involved in the woman’s suffrage movement. Isabella joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as a member of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1869. She was a founding member of the Connecticut Woman’s Suffrage Association. Isabella’s ideas of equality were influenced by John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty and the Subjection of Women.

In 1871, Isabella organized the annual convention of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association in Washington D.C. and presented her argument before the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. Her husband, John Hooker, believed in his wife and supported her activities. He helped Isabella draft a bill to the Connecticut Legislature giving married women the same property rights as their husbands. The bill passed in 1877. Isabella annually submitted a bill granting women the right to vote, but it did not pass in her lifetime.