Harriet Beecher Stowe

During her association with the Lane Theological Seminary, she joined the Semi-colon club where she met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a widower and professor at the seminary. They married on July 6, 1836 and had seven children together including twin daughters.

In 1832, when the Stowe family moved to Cincinnati, they moved to a house which was a part of the former Lane Seminary and lived there for many years. Now the house is owned by the Ohio Historical Society and is operated by volunteers with the ‘Friends of the Harriet Beecher Stowe house Inc.’

In 1880s, she moved to Mandarin, Florida along with her family where she founded an Episcopal Church, ‘Church of our Saviour’, with her husband. The church contains a Stowe Memorial stained glass window created by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

She was born to a religious leader Rev Lymond Beecher and his wife Roxanna Foote Beecher and was the sixth of eleven children. Her mother was a deeply religious woman and an abolitionist who passed away when she was just six. Her father remarried and the family’s new mother soon had three more children.

She often skipped the strict religious atmosphere of home by visiting her aunt Harriet Foote, and her grandmother Roxana Foote. There, she learnt the domestic arts of sewing and knitting and also had more access to books, novels and poetry.

She began her formal education at Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy where she studied language and mathematics along with other things. There, she met Sarah P. Willis who later wrote under the pseudonym ‘Fanny Fern’.

In 1831, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to join her father at Lane Theological Seminary. She also joined the Semi-colon club, a literary salon and social club, whose members included the Beecher sisters. She published several stories through it, which were about the New England people and the life she knew before she came to Cincinnati.

In 1850, she moved with her family to a home near the campus of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. In the same year, she approached Gamaleil Bailey, editor of the weekly anti slavery journal ‘National Era’, to share her plans for writing a story about the problems of slavery.

In June 1851, the first installment of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ appeared in ‘The National Era’. Its emotional depiction of the impact of slavery captured the nation’s attention and caused uproar in South regarding abolition of slavery.

On November 25, 1862, she traveled to Washington DC during Civil War and met the then President Abraham Lincoln and she claimed to have a real funny interview with the President.

In 1870s, she embarked on a reading tour for the American Literary Lecture Bureau of Boston. During her reading tours and travels in Europe she met many fellow writers including George Eliot, Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord George Gordon Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Milbanke- Lady Byron.

In 1852, she authored ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’, an anti-slavery novel that laid the groundwork for the civil war. It ignited the firestorm of protests from defenders of slavery. It garnered much praise from the abolitionists and was the first widely read political novel in the United States.

In 1859, her historical novel, ‘The Minister’s wooing’, was published. It further highlighted the issue of slavery and critiqued the Calvinistic theology. It combined comedy with regional history to show the convergence of daily life, slavery and religion in post-revolutionary England.

Among her other major works were ‘Dred: A tale of the great dismal swamp’ (1856), ‘The pearl of Orrs Island: A story of the coast of Maine’ (1862), ‘Palmetto leaves’ (1873), ‘Queer little folks’ (1897) etc.