From the earliest days of the American colonies, through the Gilded Age, to the late 20th century, The Lodge Women traces a line of the family's remarkable history that is at once intensely personal, political and wholly universal. Based on archival research, interviews and personal memoirs, the stories are largely told through the voices of the actors themselves, heard in the rich collection of personal letters exchanged with the luminaries of the time whose lives were linked with the Lodges in politics, the arts and family: Henry Adams, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, Elizabeth Cameron and Edith Wharton, some of whose letters are published here for the first time.