Tag: Harriet Beecher Stowe

She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in their own right. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became an evangelist for reform. Her great-niece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose grandmother, Mary, was one of Harriet’s sisters. Her sister Catherine was an educator who founded the Hartford Female Seminary.

When Harriet was young, the family moved to Cincinnati, where they found themselves at the border of the North and South, East and West, and at the center of an increasing antislavery sentiment. Here she began to write for literary and evangelical periodicals.

When she was twenty-five she married one of her father’s colleagues at a theological seminary in Ohio, Calvin Stowe; and when he was appointed to the faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, she returned to New England. It was during services at the Brunswick Congregational Church that she was inspired to write her most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she penned at her kitchen table.