Author Angela Reich will give a lecture at the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum on Thursday, April 30, at 7:00 pm – Storms, Shipwrecks, Lifesavers, and Lightkeepers: The History of the Fire Island Lighthouse. She will speak in the Reichert Planetarium.
Reich, who lives on Long Island’s South Shore, serves as docent for New York’s historical Fire Island Lighthouse, and sails as crewmember for the Long Island Maritime Museum’s 1888 historic oyster sloop Priscilla.
The first Fire Island Lighthouse, built in 1826, provided a guiding beacon for maritime traffic along the nation’s busiest shipping lanes, the approaches to New York Harbor. In addition, shore-based safety, addressed by the Lifesaving Benevolent Association, was manned by local resident volunteers who patrolled our shores.
These maritime safety measures, however, lacked appropriate federal funding, and became the target of great scrutiny after the wreck of the ship Elizabeth off Long Island shores in July of 1850. That incident tragically ended the life of noted American writer Margaret Fuller. Editor of The Dial, the country’s first literary magazine, and collaborator with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Fuller was a beloved literary voice in America.
Margaret Fuller’s story is the subject of Angela Reich’s first novel, Shipwreck of Hopes. Drawing inventively on the lives that converged with the fate of the ship Elizabeth in 1850, the novel goes beyond biography to reveal the harrowing journeys of those involved on that desperate day.
Copies of her novel will be available for purchase ($20.00, cash only) at the lecture. She will donate twenty percent of her book sales to the Museum.
Fuller’s fame and her unnecessary death instigated a barrage of negative publicity that swept the country. This national scrutiny exposed the lack of funding and poor condition of the country’s lighthouses and of the federal Life-Saving Service, which impacted the future of American maritime safety. The subsequent public outcry played an essential role in reshaping and vastly reforming the Lighthouse and Life-Saving System, ultimately improving maritime safety and saving thousands of lives.
An independent researcher, Reich has shared her knowledge of Long Island’s maritime history through lectures for the Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society and at dozens of Long Island historical societies. She holds a Ph.D. in literature, has published articles on literary criticism in professional journals, and a book on John Milton’s Paradise Regained.