Loves of Harriet Beecher StoweThe author of Hawthorne in Concord “brings [Stowe] to life in all her glory, in a book at once so dramatic and so subtle that it rivals the best fiction” (Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet it was just one of many accomplishments of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century. Historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the boomtown of Cincinnati, where Harriet’s glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We meet Harriet’s loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother Henry, the most famous preacher of his time. As McFarland leads us through Harriet’s ever-changing world, he traces the arc of her literary career from her hard-scrabble beginnings to her ascendancy as the most renowned author of her day. Through the portrait of a defining American family, Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe opens into an unforgettable rendering of mid-nineteenth century America in the midst of unprecedented social and demographic explosions. To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reverberates as a crucial document in Western culture. “Often dismissed even by her admirers as a pious faculty wife who just happened to write the book of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe emerges in Philip McFarland’s biography in all her complexity and genius.” —Charles Calhoun, author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life and The Gilded Age |
From inside the book
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Page 8
... death, had reached Cincinnati and was running a dreadful course there, in this first of its several outbreaks as a scourge of nineteenthcentury America. So the Beechers delayed for a week at Wheeling, where Dr. Beecher improved his ...
... death, had reached Cincinnati and was running a dreadful course there, in this first of its several outbreaks as a scourge of nineteenthcentury America. So the Beechers delayed for a week at Wheeling, where Dr. Beecher improved his ...
Page 19
... death of free speech and an absence of Christian charity. From classes of forty students at its inception, enrollment at the seminary shrank over the following decade to as few as five. Harriet Beecher's letters of the time, in the mid ...
... death of free speech and an absence of Christian charity. From classes of forty students at its inception, enrollment at the seminary shrank over the following decade to as few as five. Harriet Beecher's letters of the time, in the mid ...
Page 20
... death; there would be no fear in it”), and from Buffalo on across New York to western Massachusetts, to attend the graduation from Amherst College of yet another brother, Henry, younger and closest to her in age. While in the East, she ...
... death; there would be no fear in it”), and from Buffalo on across New York to western Massachusetts, to attend the graduation from Amherst College of yet another brother, Henry, younger and closest to her in age. While in the East, she ...
Page 21
... death,” brows knit, deadly pale, exhibiting “distressing movements of convulsive throes I thought O Lord God can we go through with this!” Relating their ordeal, Harriet's stepmother would spare her reader nothing. “Mr. Stowe said O my ...
... death,” brows knit, deadly pale, exhibiting “distressing movements of convulsive throes I thought O Lord God can we go through with this!” Relating their ordeal, Harriet's stepmother would spare her reader nothing. “Mr. Stowe said O my ...
Page 25
... death when Calvin was six, another move thereafter into his grandmother's home. The earliest of his bedrooms in the three successive residences was upstairs in front. There, a door in one wall opened on an unfinished closet, low and ...
... death when Calvin was six, another move thereafter into his grandmother's home. The earliest of his bedrooms in the three successive residences was upstairs in front. There, a door in one wall opened on an unfinished closet, low and ...
Contents
3 | |
11 | |
23 | |
32 | |
43 | |
54 | |
63 | |
Uncle Toms Cabin | 74 |
Civil War | 157 |
Postbellum | 167 |
A Vindication | 177 |
Aftermath | 187 |
henry | 195 |
The Beechers | 197 |
Religion | 206 |
Brooklyn | 215 |
Reception | 83 |
Dark Places | 91 |
lyman | 99 |
To England | 101 |
Culture | 112 |
Looking Back | 121 |
Return to Europe | 131 |
Heartbreak | 140 |
The Ministers Wooing | 149 |
Changing America | 225 |
My Wife and I | 235 |
Scandal | 245 |
Inside the Home | 254 |
Trial | 263 |
Late Years | 274 |
notes | 293 |
works cited | 315 |
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Common terms and phrases
abolitionist American Andover appeared Autobiography of Lyman Boston Brooklyn brother Brunswick C. E. Stowe Calvin Stowe Calvinist Catharine Catharine Beecher century Charles Charley child Cincinnati congregation daughter dead dear death decade Dred earlier early east editor Edward England Essays family’s father feel felt Fred George Georgiana God’s Harriet Beecher Stowe Hartford Hatty heart Hedrick Henry Ward Beecher Henry’s husband Ibid Lady Byron Lady Byron Vindicated Lane Seminary Lane Theological Seminary later letter Litchfield living Lord Byron Lyman Beecher meanwhile minister Minister’s months mother never novel Ohio Plymouth Church poet poet’s Professor Stowe quoted readers Reverend sermons slave slavery South southern spirit story Stowe’s Theodore Tilton thing Tilton tion Uncle Tom’s Cabin Victoria Woodhull Walnut Hills wife wife’s woman women writing wrote York young