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Chapter 1 j en n i fer co gna r d -bl ack Harriet Beecher Stowe (8–896) That Harriet Beecher Stowe would become, at age forty, the best-known and best-paid author of nineteenth-century America was, in part, the accident of having been born and raised in antebellum New England—a time and a place in which women writers dominated the American literary scene. The seventh child of Roxana Foote Beecher and Lyman Beecher, Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 4, 8. Roxana was a novel reader, while Lyman practiced evangelical ministry, and this combination came to fruition in the adult Stowe: a natural preacher and a voluminous reader and writer of popular novels. These aspects of Stowe’s personality were fostered by her early education and marriage . From 824 to 827, Stowe attended Hartford Female Seminary, founded by her sister Catherine. This seminary was unlike any other, operating on a kind of collaborative pedagogy and offering a curriculum commensurate with that taught to boys. Stowe began teaching as soon as she arrived, which enabled her to advocate her liberal Protestantism as well as her love of good books, all to an audience of young girls (future “readers”). In turn, in 836 after Stowe moved to Cincinnati and married the professor Calvin Ellis Stowe, she gained both the intellectual support of a literary husband and the opportunity, as a woman in charge of her own home, to practice and hone what Stowe’s most recent biographer , Joan Hedrick, has termed “parlor literature.” For it is in the parlor that Stowe began her writing career, crafting short stories for a Cincinnati reading club, sending letters to the sick and bereaved, and writing entertaining correspondence for family gatherings—a kind of real-life, epistolary “novel” read out loud. Akin to teaching at the seminary, Stowe’s audience 22 | jennifer cognard-black was primarily women, and her early writing is indicative of the voice of everyday comfort and virtue that she would later develop in her novels. Throughout the 830s and 40s, Stowe published a book of local color narratives, Primary Geography for Children (833); stories and essays in the periodicals Godey’s Lady’s Book, the Western Monthly Magazine, and the New-York Evangelist; and a collection of fifteen of these stories entitled The Mayflowers (843). With these early publications , Stowe gained her first national audience, an audience that sought relief from poverty, industrialization, disease, and high mortality rates—especially among children. This audience looked to the kind of parlor-based morality that Stowe offered: feminine, evangelical, and egalitarian. This morality became the basis for the narrative voice of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Stowe wrote as a reaction against the 850 Fugitive Slave Law. Stowe’s novel has repeatedly been credited as one of the factors that precipitated the Civil War, and Stowe herself has been called the “voice of the nation” on abolition. Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared as weekly serializations in the National Era from June 85 through April 852, and with it Stowe acquired international fame as well as the full-time vocation of an author¹—“author,” here, meaning a pre-professional practice in the antebellum marketplace.² Until the late 860s, parlor literature was precisely what the nation wished to read. As a result, Stowe’s books were both profitable and popular: her account of the stories that inspired her to write on slavery, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (853); her travelogue, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (854); her second slavery novel, Dred (856); her local color books, The Minister’s Wooing (859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (862), and Oldtown Folks (869); her Italian romance, Agnes of Sorrento (862); and her domestic sketches, Household Papers and Stories (865 – 867) and Little Foxes (866). In 853, Stowe had written to an English admirer: “I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother I was oppressed & broken-hearted, with the sorrows & injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity—because as a lover of my country I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”³ Stowe took for granted that her position of woman, Christian, and citizen provided her with a right to authorship as well as an inherent appeal to her American readers, and these assumptions proved accurate throughout the first three decades of Stowe’s career. In 869, however, Stowe published an article, “The True Story of...

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