Though
Uncle Tom's Cabin was not the first antislavery novel, it was incontrovertibly the most engaging, and it sold phenomenally well.
Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on 14 June 1811 to well-known Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher and his wife Roxana (Foote) Beecher, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was raised in an atmosphere of unblinking Calvinist piety. Though she left home at the age of thirteen to attend her sister Catharine's school for teenaged girls, Harriet did not escape the effects of her demanding father and doctrinaire upbringing until she was well into middle age. That she wanted to escape both influences is a finding on which biographers concur, citing her neurotic mood swings, severe self-reproaches, and eventual admission to the Episcopalian Church. The consensus is that Stowe's father, who was one of the best-known preachers in America, set impossibly high standards that left most of his eleven children driven, self-doubting, and distraught. Despite these pressures, or because of them, several of Lyman Beecher's children became extremely successful. The eldest, Catharine, became known as an educator, an advocate of training schools for female teachers, author of the best-selling housekeeping guide of the century, and an innovative domestic architect; while Henry Ward Beecher, who was much younger, became the famous (and later perhaps notorious) pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.
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