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
... months the disease had been anticipated with dread, newspapers full of its horrors in Europe, then in England, then relentlessly over the Atlantic to New York and inland. Now the mysterious cholera, with its spectacular symptoms that ...
... months the disease had been anticipated with dread, newspapers full of its horrors in Europe, then in England, then relentlessly over the Atlantic to New York and inland. Now the mysterious cholera, with its spectacular symptoms that ...
Page 13
... months before the Beechers aboard their great chartered coach were rumbling westward through Pennsylvania toward a new life. Mrs. Trollope had liked little of what awaited those travelers at their destination: the spitting everywhere ...
... months before the Beechers aboard their great chartered coach were rumbling westward through Pennsylvania toward a new life. Mrs. Trollope had liked little of what awaited those travelers at their destination: the spitting everywhere ...
Page 17
... months soon after arriving in the West, “my whole time has been taken up in the labor of our new school, or wasted in the fatigue and lassitude following such labor. To-day is Sunday, and I am staying at home because I think it is time ...
... months soon after arriving in the West, “my whole time has been taken up in the labor of our new school, or wasted in the fatigue and lassitude following such labor. To-day is Sunday, and I am staying at home because I think it is time ...
Page 18
... months of 1834, a group of idealistic seminarians at Lane, many of them older than their counterparts today, met in Walnut Hills to urge their slaveholding neighbors south of the Ohio River to live by the spirit of the gospel. Those ...
... months of 1834, a group of idealistic seminarians at Lane, many of them older than their counterparts today, met in Walnut Hills to urge their slaveholding neighbors south of the Ohio River to live by the spirit of the gospel. Those ...
Page 21
... months that followed, “that he has given me a female friend to whom I can open my heart. There are some feelings which a man cannot exercise, and my heart cannot rest in masculine friendship alone. I must be within reach of woman's love ...
... months that followed, “that he has given me a female friend to whom I can open my heart. There are some feelings which a man cannot exercise, and my heart cannot rest in masculine friendship alone. I must be within reach of woman's love ...
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