Lena Allen Webster Stoiber Rood Ellis was equal parts Unsinkable Molly Brown, Scarlet O’Hara, and Auntie Mame. During a time when women were excluded from business and the professions, she claimed a role that was as centraland asconsequential as a man’s; when women’s achievements were most often uncelebrated, she insisted that hers have national attention; when told that her demeanor was more masculine than was suitable, she answered by having affairs with and marriages to strong and noteworthy men.  From her childhood, Lena sought to be recognized as more than even she thought she was at the time, destined to be something grand.  And at the end of her life, she had reached heights that she could never have imagined.

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Synopsis

 

Lena begins her life in her mother’s boarding house on what is the American frontier of Minnesota.  We first come to know her when, at age fifteen, she marries a promising lawyer from Connecticut twice her age. Something occurs in their first months of marriage that alienates her from him.  Nevertheless, she follows him from the refinement of Litchfield to a succession of gritty and isolated mining towns in Colorado where he finally deserts her. 

 

Bruised but undaunted, Lena moves alone to Denver where she finds work as a department store clerk and files for divorce, one of the earliest recorded in the state.  She meets Edward Stoiber, a brilliant young mining engineer from a wealthy family in New York.  They marry and she joins him in Silverton, where he makes her co-owner and partner in what soon becomes a hugely successful silver mine high in the San Juan Mountains.  They make a powerful team. While he focuses on the processes of mining, she manages the business affairs and the miners, often hauling them out of saloons and back to work, riding with them in oar buckets, and holding back strikers who threaten the mine with a rifle in her hands.  She becomes known as “Captain Jack,” tough, profane, and often at odds with her neighbors, but ultimately a knowledgeable and highly respected member of what is decidedly a man’s world.  She is the second woman elected to the American Institute of Mining Engineers. 

 

Increasingly, Lena wishes also to be recognized as a woman of refined tastes. She builds a mansion in the mountains near their mine where she entertains leaders of the national Federation of Women’s Clubs; makes her way into Denver’s most exclusive social circle, the “Sacred 36;” and becomes a member of the group of women who establish Mesa Verde National Park. After selling the mine to the Guggenheims in 1901 for $2.3 million, she and Edward try to retire in Denver, but he finds it difficult to adapt to a world limited to clubs and social events.  From a vacation trip to Hawaii, he sets out on an adventure across the Eurasian Continent aboard the new Trans-Siberian Railroad. Meanwhile, Lena goes to Paris where Edward rejoins her. There, they rent a magnificent apartment on the Champs Elysées and plunge into la Belle Epoque.  But, after just two years, Edward contracts typhoid fever and dies.

 

Devastated, Lena brings Edward’s body back to Denver where she builds memorials to him --a mausoleum modeled after the Parthenon and a mansion that one newspaper calls “the finest dwelling between the Missouri and the Pacific.”  Stoiberhof has forty-six rooms, nine fireplaces, an indoor swimming pool, and a bowling alley.  When it is finished, she has it shuttered and seldom uses it.

 

Returning to Paris, Lena is courted by the newly installed King of Serbia who has a royal family but lacks the funds to support it.  He offers to make her Queen, but she refuses.  Nevertheless, she becomes an active part of the American Colony and of Parisian society.  Just as she seems to have become an ex-patriot, she meets and marries Hugh Rood of Seattle, the wealthy co-owner of the largest creosoting business in the world. Lena takes an active interest in the company and loans it substantial amounts of money.  It gives her a presence in Seattle’s business and social communities.  But the stress of a lawsuit in Denver forces Lena and Hugh to retreat to Paris.  After a few months, Hugh decides to return alone to Seattle on the maiden voyage of the Titanic.  He is in the company of John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Charles M. Hays putting women and children into lifeboats as the great ship sinks in the North Atlantic.

 

Lena is with friends in England when she hears of the disaster.  She returns to New York with hope that Hugh might have survived, then goes to Halifax, Nova Scotia where the remains of the two hundred Titanic victims eventually recovered were being brought.  One of the only widows there, she examines every body, only to discover that Hugh is not among them. She becomes known there as the gentle wife who placed bouquets on every coffin and banked the churches with flowers.

 

When she returns to Seattle, Lena finds she is not welcome to reclaim her role in the creosoting company and is accused, along with Hugh, of having driven the company on the rocks.  Embarrassed, Lena tries to gain a majority position in the company but is defeated at the last minute.  She returns to Denver briefly to sell Stoiberhof, but uses it one last time to throw the biggest and most elaborate social event in Denver’s history.  Back in Seattle again, she reestablishes her business bona fides by investing $1 million in the city’s downtown development.  

 

With WWI brewing in Europe, Lena has affairs with several military officers and attends patriotic events.  At one of them, she meets navy Commander Mark St. Clair Ellis, the handsome hero of the sabotage of the Mare Naval Shipyard.  They marry just four months after the death of his first wife, and move to Charleston where he is given command of the Naval Training Station.  Despite the devastation of the influenza pandemic of 1918, Mark’s position and Lena’s money contribute to the success of the camp.  But, just as his career seems about to blossom, it is discovered that he has left a secret family in California, abandoning his lover and their three children.  The scandal reaches the Secretary of the Navy, and he is retired.

 

Lena and Mark live briefly in his hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas where she decides to limit his access to her money and to establish separate lives.  Worried that she might divorce him or cut off his funds entirely, he panics and marries Mary Taylor, a troubled heiress.  Now a bigamist, Mark leaves his new wife and has yet another affair with Lena’s closest friend, Rose.  Betrayed and angry, Lena’s intervention ends his marriage to Mary, who commits suicide, and sends Mark and Rose to live out of the public eye near Paris.  She retires to her villa in Northern Italy where, at age 68, she has a brief but touching love affair with Robert Martin, an American she had met a few years earlier. Later, he writes that she had cast a spell on him that he could never forget.  Following visits from her sister and her half-brother, Lena dies alone at the villa, with only the company of her dogs and her servants.