Celebrate Women's History Month

Her joyous remembrance of her first decade on an enchanted island

And of those cherished friends who inspired her best-selling trilogy, Lighthouse, New Moon Rising, and Beloved Invader. After only a few golden hours on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, Eugenia Price longed to make it her home. Even though she loved her old town house in Chicago, and her busy writing and lecturing schedule, the shadow-streaked, light-filled place had cast its spell and would not let her go. The reader, too, will feel the Island’s magic as Genie describes her odyssey with her friend Joyce Blackburn from the urban North to Southern small-town community life and peace.

With deep affection and humor she shares her many friendships—with “the first six,” the elderly folk who gave her their love, their stories, and their memories so that she could write her novels of St. Simons; with her beloved editor, Tay Hohoff, who encouraged and goaded her; and with all the other people who helped with her writing and with the building of her Island home in the midst of the “dear dark woods.”

Although she had been uncertain at first of her welcome to St. Simons, she later experienced the rare privilege of having the Island name a day in her honor.

These intimate pages are also filled with Genie’s quiet faith in God and her eternal gratitude for His grace in sending her to St. Simons. She calls her book a memoir, but it is more than that. It is a thanksgiving celebration of life and of its surprising goodness even in the midst of sorrow and loss. So that she can exclaim to Joyce, “How could life be better than it is right now?”

Her joyous remembrance of her first decade on an enchanted island

And of those cherished friends who inspired her best-selling trilogy, Lighthouse, New Moon Rising, and Beloved Invader. After only a few golden hours on Georgia’s St. Simons Island, Eugenia Price longed to make it her home. Even though she loved her old town house in Chicago, and her busy writing and lecturing schedule, the shadow-streaked, light-filled place had cast its spell and would not let her go. The reader, too, will feel the Island’s magic as Genie describes her odyssey with her friend Joyce Blackburn from the urban North to Southern small-town community life and peace.

With deep affection and humor she shares her many friendships—with “the first six,” the elderly folk who gave her their love, their stories, and their memories so that she could write her novels of St. Simons; with her beloved editor, Tay Hohoff, who encouraged and goaded her; and with all the other people who helped with her writing and with the building of her Island home in the midst of the “dear dark woods.”

Although she had been uncertain at first of her welcome to St. Simons, she later experienced the rare privilege of having the Island name a day in her honor.

These intimate pages are also filled with Genie’s quiet faith in God and her eternal gratitude for His grace in sending her to St. Simons. She calls her book a memoir, but it is more than that. It is a thanksgiving celebration of life and of its surprising goodness even in the midst of sorrow and loss. So that she can exclaim to Joyce, “How could life be better than it is right now?”

The last and longest private owner of the Hope Diamond, Evalyn Walsh McLean led anything but an ordinary life. Evalyn grew up a poor girl in a rough Colorado mining town where her father discovered one of the largest gold mines in the United States. The newly wealthy family relocated to Washington, D.C., where she met and married Ned McLean, who inherited the renowned Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer. With the combined influence of the Walsh and McLean families, Evalyn developed friendships with the politically prominent in the nation’s capital and became the city’s favorite hostess. Notorious for giving magnificent parties, she counted the Tafts, the Hardings, the Coolidges, Alice Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Ethel Barrymore among her many personal friends.

The McLeans purchased the Hope Diamond when Evalyn was only twenty-four.Wagging tongues and the diamond’s supposed curse did not, however, prevent her from wearing it. She lost the diamond a few times, too, once by putting it around her Great Dane’s neck. When she left the Hope Diamond to her grandchildren in 1947, it was worth two million dollars.

Evalyn loved her diamonds, but she loved children, pets, and life more. The deep indigo stone is but a single facet of her story. Her autobiography, Father Struck It Rich, became a best-seller in the mid-thirties. Now illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, Queen of Diamonds is that autobiography with a foreword by her great-grandson and an epilogue describing the last decade of her life.