" No American novel has had so
curious a history and so great or so immediate an influence in
this country and in Europe. In spite of all that has been written
about it, its author's purpose is still widely misunderstood,
particularly in the South, and the controversy over this one
epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the literary reputation
which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books.
Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen,
was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen
years, from 1832 to 1849, she lived in the border city of
Cincinnati, within sight of slave territory, and in daily contact
with victims of the slave system. While her sympathies, like
those of her father Lyman Beecher, were anti-slavery, she was not
an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of that word. At twenty
five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin Stowe, to whom
she bore many children. She had written a few sketches of New
England life, and her family thought her a woman of genius. Such
was the situation in the winter of 1849-1850, when the Stowes
migrated to Brunswick, Maine, where the husband had been
appointed to a chair at Bowdoin.
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