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 9
... To Georgiana, Harriet wrote candidly, in the spring of 1833, of ill health and low spirits since coming to Cincinnati. Her new surroundings appeared somehow less substantial than the old. V3612p01.pmd 2/16/07, 3:22 PM 9 Calvin • 9.
... To Georgiana, Harriet wrote candidly, in the spring of 1833, of ill health and low spirits since coming to Cincinnati. Her new surroundings appeared somehow less substantial than the old. V3612p01.pmd 2/16/07, 3:22 PM 9 Calvin • 9.
Page 10
Philip McFarland. Her new surroundings appeared somehow less substantial than the old. “About half of my time I am scarcely alive, and a great part of the rest the slave and sport of morbid feeling and unreasonable prejudice.” But why ...
Philip McFarland. Her new surroundings appeared somehow less substantial than the old. “About half of my time I am scarcely alive, and a great part of the rest the slave and sport of morbid feeling and unreasonable prejudice.” But why ...
Page 17
... less strident than formerly. What tempered his words was a public calamity back in Boston, where a Protestant mob on a Monday in August 1834, in the aftermath of widespread anti-Catholic preaching and under the gaze of impassive ...
... less strident than formerly. What tempered his words was a public calamity back in Boston, where a Protestant mob on a Monday in August 1834, in the aftermath of widespread anti-Catholic preaching and under the gaze of impassive ...
Page 29
... less able academically; and in the class behind—in a single small, remote young college—were one adept scholar and another less so: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne.) After graduating, Stowe lingered a year in ...
... less able academically; and in the class behind—in a single small, remote young college—were one adept scholar and another less so: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne.) After graduating, Stowe lingered a year in ...
Page 36
... less ample than housing that other professors at Lane enjoyed. By the summer of 1837 this mild-mannered scholar of biblical literature was ready to “throw Lane Seminary to the dogs if they do not justice to me in this respect, and you ...
... less ample than housing that other professors at Lane enjoyed. By the summer of 1837 this mild-mannered scholar of biblical literature was ready to “throw Lane Seminary to the dogs if they do not justice to me in this respect, and you ...
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