Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–96) was an American abolitionist and novelist. She was the most widely known American woman writer of the 19th century. She won fame with her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852,) which strengthened the abolitionist cause with its descriptions of the sufferings caused by slavery. Harriet’s brother was the Congregationalist clergyman and writer Henry Ward Beecher.
Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Stowe lived for many years in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Kentucky. Ohio did not permit slavery, but Kentucky did, and so Cincinnati was a popular destination for runaway slaves. Stowe saw many slaves rushing across the frozen river in the winter, which was part of the inspiration to write her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852.) It reached millions as a novel and a play and became influential in the United States and the United Kingdom. It mobilized anti-slavery forces in the American North while inciting widespread anger in the South. When she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he purportedly exclaimed, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) was also a slave novel, but its reception was less enthusiastic than that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In her later works, Stowe questioned the cultural bases of capitalism and consumerism by revisiting the early 1850s’ virtues of humility, charity, self-discipline, and social usefulness.
Stowe wrote more than 20 books that included novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. Later in life, she spoke and wrote of the need to protect the women’s rights movement from those who advocated free love and free divorce.
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Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly, and in a spirit of love.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
O, with what freshness,
what solemnity and beauty,
is each new day born;
as if to say to insensate man,
‘Behold!
thou hast one more chance!
Strive for immortal glory!
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
In all ranks of life the human heart yearns for the beautiful; and the beautiful things that God makes are his gift to all alike.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Desires, Desire, Beauty
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Mother, Mothers, Mothers Day
Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Music
A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Conservatives, Reflection
The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. — The gentle need the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Excellence
When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n’t hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that ‘s just the place and time that the tide ‘ll turn. Never trust to prayer without using every means in your power, and never use the means without trusting in prayer.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Endurance, Virtues, Perseverance, Persistence, Resolve
Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserved; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Home
Women are the real architects of society.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Women
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe
Topics: Mediocrity
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