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 3
... took care to account for the party present one by one. She was writing back home and wanted her sister's family in Hartford to picture the scene. See them, then, gathered in the front parlor of a Pennsylvania tavern. Father is opposite ...
... took care to account for the party present one by one. She was writing back home and wanted her sister's family in Hartford to picture the scene. See them, then, gathered in the front parlor of a Pennsylvania tavern. Father is opposite ...
Page 8
... took us eight days.” Moreover, having reached the Ohio River at last, at Wheeling (still in Virginia in those antebellum years), the Beechers were advised to linger. They had meant to push on at once by riverboat, but Asian cholera had ...
... took us eight days.” Moreover, having reached the Ohio River at last, at Wheeling (still in Virginia in those antebellum years), the Beechers were advised to linger. They had meant to push on at once by riverboat, but Asian cholera had ...
Page 16
... took an active part. To Georgiana back in Hartford she reported of writing a piece to be read next Monday evening at the club, at Uncle Sam's, he being the brother of Harriet's own mother, Dr. Beecher's late first wife. What the younger ...
... took an active part. To Georgiana back in Hartford she reported of writing a piece to be read next Monday evening at the club, at Uncle Sam's, he being the brother of Harriet's own mother, Dr. Beecher's late first wife. What the younger ...
Page 17
Philip McFarland. magazine. Her entry easily took the prize, a substantial fifty dollars and publication—Harriet E. Beecher's first such bearing her name—in the April 1834 issue of the journal. Earlier she had been teaching at her ...
Philip McFarland. magazine. Her entry easily took the prize, a substantial fifty dollars and publication—Harriet E. Beecher's first such bearing her name—in the April 1834 issue of the journal. Earlier she had been teaching at her ...
Page 21
... took comfort from it. But on the following day she was discovered “struggling with death,” brows knit, deadly pale, exhibiting “distressing movements of convulsive throes I thought O Lord God can we go through with this!” Relating their ...
... took comfort from it. But on the following day she was discovered “struggling with death,” brows knit, deadly pale, exhibiting “distressing movements of convulsive throes I thought O Lord God can we go through with this!” Relating their ...
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