Eliza Howland

Eliza Newton Woolsey Howland (1835 – 1917) was an American author and the wife of Union Army officer Joseph Howland.

Life Howland was born on 22 July 1835 to a prominent New York City family active in philanthropy and social reform, especially abolitionism and the decent care of the mentally ill. Her parents were Charles William Woolsey, a descendant of an early English settler in what was then the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, and Jane Eliza Newton of Alexandria, Virginia.

At the age of nineteen, she married Joseph Howland, the son of Samuel Shaw Howland, a New York City shipping magnate. This book was republished in 2001 as My Heart Towards Home: letters of a family during the Civil War. Howland also wrote and privately printed Family records: being some account of the ancestry of my mother and father Charles William Woolsey and Jane Eliza Newton in 1900.

In 1885, Joseph Howland died while on a trip to Menton, France. Eliza Howland left their estate at Tioronda and never returned to it, claiming that the memories of her husband made staying in the house too difficult.

She died in Newport, Rhode Island, on 3 July 1917 at the age of 82. After her death the family's estate at Tioronda became Craig House, a hospital for the mentally ill.