Hetty Woodstone is our focus on this week’s installment of Hitting the Books with CBS’s Ghosts.
[What is Hitting the Books with CBS’s Ghosts? To find out, click here. And check out our previous installment on Isaac.]
Played by Rebecca Wisocky, Hetty is Samantha’s fourth-great-grandmother and the original owner of the Woodstone country estate. As explained in this article, Hetty died around 1891 or just before. The late 1800s is a rich with organizations pushing for women’s rights. However, Hetty was already financially well off and I don’t get the sense that she supported women’s liberation. So, for Hetty, I’d recommend The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age. By 1885, while her husband had $700k in debt, Hetty Green had a net worth of $26 million in stocks and other assets. When Green – also called “The Witch of Wall Street – died in 1916, she was worth close to $100 million, an amount equal to over $2.5 billion currently.
I also think that Hetty would have been influenced by two books published in the late 1860s. One is Louise May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). The other book is The American Woman’s Home by Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Given how popular those two books were, women like Hetty would have known about them and was probably influenced by these texts.
Of note, Rebecca Wisocky said in an interview with PopCulture.com’s Tania Hussain that she read Cecelia Tichi’s book What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age to prepare for the role of Hetty.
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