Written by Bill Bucklin

When you think of famous authors from Litchfield, CT, of course Harriet Beecher Stowe comes to mind. The works of a second Litchfield author, once famous, also reside in the stacks of the Litchfield Historical Society. Helen Smith Woodruff wrote 11 novels between 1912 and 1921, some of them completed while summering in Litchfield with her husband Lewis B. Woodruff of New York City, descendant of one of Litchfield’s founding families.

Helen Smith Woodruff was a society woman with a remarkable social consciousness. After undergoing a short period of blindness from scarlet fever she wrote the novel The Lady of the Lighthouse, published in 1913. The lighthouse in the title is misleading, because Woodruff’s focus is on the main character’s mission to brighten the world of a young blind boy in New York City, one of many blind children at a rehab facility known as the Lighthouse. Woodruff donated the proceeds of all her books to charity. The $300,000 in royalties from The Lady of the Lighthouse went to the New York Association for the Blind, the equivalent of ten million dollars today.

Helen Smith Woodruff died in New York City in 1924 as the result of a fall from a second-story window in her New York home after a long period of illness at the age of only 36 (https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/helen-smith-woodruff/). One imagines summers in Litchfield were darker without her.