Harriet Beecher Stowe, daughter of a preacher, married to a poor Biblical scholar, and mother of nine, had the early good fortune of an education at a school founded by her feminist older sister. To help support her family, Stowe began to write. In 1851, born of evangelical outrage against slavery, her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin made her famous. Today the very name conveys white paternalism and black passivity, but Hedrick points out that this unfairly ignores the "freedom narrative" of a book that had an electrifying effect on the abolitionist cause. When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862 he joked, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Hedrick's illuminating biography of this remarkable woman won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.


From Publishers Weekly
This first major biography of Stowe (1811-1896) in some 50 years offers an insightful account of the life and work of the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin . Hedrick, director of women's studies at Trinity College in Connecticut, is especially good at laying out the context of Stowe's life: the constraints and opportunities for well-born New England women in the 1800s; the influence of the Bible and of "parlor literature and parlor music" on her work; and how the lack of political outlets for women helped fuel her outrage against slavery. In Uncle Tom's Cabin , published in weekly installments from June 1851 to April 1852 in the magazine National Era , Stowe modeled the characters mainly on her own black domestic servants without considering that "her position as white mistress to black servants radically compromised her perceptions." Nonetheless, Hedrick praises her for forcing whites to confront "the voices of a colonized people." Hedrick includes much information on Stowe's family life and lengthy but checkered writing career, noting that while she contributed to a new cultural vitality by supporting the Atlantic Monthly , founded in 1857, she and other women writers were ultimately disregarded. Regrettably, the book ends with Stowe's death and doesn't track the 20th-century debates about the place of Stowe's most famous work in our cultural canon. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In writing this biography of Stowe, the most substantial since Forrest Wilson's Crusader in Crinoline won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941, Hedrick (women's studies, Trinity Coll., Ct.) has created an engaging and informative book that brings to life not just the complex and fascinating woman and writer but also the 19th-century America that shaped her and was shaped by her. Hedrick manages to weave into this immensely readable biography a history teeming with the domestic detail of the famous Beecher clan, the settling of the West, and the impact of the Civil War and the abolition movement. At the same time, Hedrick constructs a fascinating portrait of women's lives in the 19th century. Stowe rarely failed to give an adoring public what it wanted, from her wildly popular serial novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-52) through the long, lucrative career that filled America's nostalgic need for novels about old New England. This biography is worth adding even to collections that own Wilson's book. Highly recommended.- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, E. L. Doctorow
A classic biography--engrossing, capacious, definitive . . . [Stowe was] a powerhouse of evangelical intellect who managed to draw through her life all the great moral and cultural struggles of her century.


From Booklist
It's been 50 years since the last biography of the once adulated, eventually maligned author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe, was published, and it's high time for a new look at this hugely influential writer. Hedrick, a dynamic social and literary historian, has made great use of previously unavailable materials and written a far-reaching and brilliantly synthesized narrative that not only relates Stowe's complex personal story, but also captures the ferment and verve of America's antebellum era. Born in 1811 into the industrious evangelical Beecher family of Massachusetts, Stowe came of age in unison with the emergence of America's fledgling national consciousness. After receiving an unusually thorough education for a woman of her time, Stowe began her writing life in the thriving frontier city of Cincinnati, winning over magazine readers with her conversational tone, acute observations, pioneering use of dialect, shrewd irony, and unabashed melodrama. As Hedrick tracks Stowe's progress from a scribbler of "parlor literature" to a world-renowned novelist and abolitionist, she makes certain that we understand just how much the status of women and the lack of reliable birth control shaped Stowe's daily life and moral outlook. It was the trauma of the deaths of several of her seven children that sensitized Stowe to the horrors of slave life and inspired her most famous work. A major achievement, this respectful and empathic portrait illuminates a crucial figure in our history. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
In this definitive biography, Hedrick (History/Trinity; the scholarly Solitary Comrade, 1982--not reviewed) applies a feminine perspective to the fascinating life and tumultuous times of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), author of what's arguably the most influential novel in history and someone who only 50 years ago was described as ``A Crusader in Crinoline'' (by Robert F. Wilson in the last full-length Stowe bio, published in 1941). Stowe's life included the common difficulties of 19th-century women--dependency, mismanaged health, exclusion from public life- -difficulties shared with the poor and with blacks, creating a natural identity of interests that, Hedrick explains, overcame barriers of race, class, and gender. The author also sees in Stowe the unfolding of literature in 19th-century America, from the instructive and entertaining ``parlour literature,'' written by women for domestic reading aloud, to literature's professionalization after 1860 in journals and universities--a transformation dominated by men. But in 1850-51, when Stowe serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin (no publisher would accept it as a book), women were still creating the new American culture--and this novel captured it, inspiring, by 1893, translations into 42 languages, as well as numerous songs, plays, toys, games, and even wallpaper patterns. Despite her success, though, tragedy plagued Stowe: Her baby son died, an adult son drowned, and two other children became addicts, afflictions for which her Calvanist religion offered no comfort. In The Minister's Wooing, Stowe continued her attack on the abstract world of male clergy and legislators that she'd begun in Uncle Tom's Cabin, affirming the comfort she derived from poor black women rather than from theology. Writing mostly for the male-dominated Atlantic, she was supporting her entire family by the end of her career--an end created, she believed, by a mental exhaustion known only to women. A splendid, balanced representation of an author in her many roles, and of the way she changed her world. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Midwest Book Review
It's a pleasure to see this 1994 New York Times award-winner in paperback: this means new audiences will have access to and be able to afford Hedrick's spirited version of Stowe's life and achievements.


Book Description
"Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject....But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to "meddle with" was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe's best-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!" In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, and the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement and the entry of women into public life. Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War, and the private tragedies that included the death of her adored eighteen month old son, the drowning of another son, and the alcohol and morphine addictions of two of her other children. The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent ministers, Stowe channeled her anguish and her ambition into a socially acceptable anger on behalf of others, transforming her private experience into powerful narratives that moved a nation. Magisterial in its breadth and rich in detail, this definitive portrait explores the full measure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, and her contribution to American literature. Perceptive and engaging, it illuminates the career of a major writer during the transition of literature from an amateur pastime to a profession, and offers a fascinating look at the pains, pleasures, and accomplishments of women's lives in the last century.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Examines the world of 19th-century morals & mores, exploring the influence of ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing in an outspoken family, & her eventful life as a writer & shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. B&W photos.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject.... But I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak." Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to begin work on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to "meddle with" was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe's best-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war!" In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multi-layered world of nineteenth-century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of "true womanhood" on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement, and the entry of women into public life. Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War....

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

In this definitive biography, Hedrick (History/Trinity; the scholarly Solitary Comrade, 1982—not reviewed) applies a feminine perspective to the fascinating life and tumultuous times of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), author of what's arguably the most influential novel in history and someone who only 50 years ago was described as "A Crusader in Crinoline" (by Robert F. Wilson in the last full-length Stowe bio, published in 1941). Stowe's life included the common difficulties of 19th-century women—dependency, mismanaged health, exclusion from public life—difficulties shared with the poor and with blacks, creating a natural identity of interests that, Hedrick explains, overcame barriers of race, class, and gender. The author also sees in Stowe the unfolding of literature in 19th-century America, from the instructive and entertaining "parlour literature," written by women for domestic reading aloud, to literature's professionalization after 1860 in journals and universities—a transformation dominated by men. But in 1850-51, when Stowe serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin (no publisher would accept it as a book), women were still creating the new American culture—and this novel captured it, inspiring, by 1893, translations into 42 languages, as well as numerous songs, plays, toys, games, and even wallpaper patterns. Despite her success, though, tragedy plagued Stowe: Her baby son died, an adult son drowned, and two other children became addicts, afflictions for which her Calvanist religion offered no comfort. In The Minister's Wooing, Stowe continued her attack on the abstract world of male clergy and legislators that she'd begun in Uncle Tom's Cabin, affirming thecomfort she derived from poor black women rather than from theology. Writing mostly for the male-dominated Atlantic, she was supporting her entire family by the end of her career—an end created, she believed, by a mental exhaustion known only to women. A splendid, balanced representation of an author in her many roles, and of the way she changed her world.