Harriet Beecher was reared in an atmosphere of "moral oxygen" charged with "intellectual electricity." Both these qualities would be injected into
Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the parsonage where she grew up, the guiding principles of life were selfabnegation and spiritual regeneration. Harriet Beecher attended Miss Sarah Pierce's school in Litchfield for five years, and at the age of thirteen she went on to the Hartford Female Seminary, run by her sister Catharine. She subsequently taught there until 1832, when the family moved to Cincinnati upon Lyman Beecher's appointment as president of the Lane Theological Seminary. She taught at the Western Female Institute, founded by Catharine Beecher, and in 1834 she won first prize in a contest conducted by the
Western Monthly Magazine. Her sketch appeared in the April 1834 issue of the magazine and was published separately as
Prize Tale: A New England Sketch (1834).
In 1836 Harriet Beecher married a widower, Calvin Stowe, professor of biblical literature at Lane. During the first seven years of their marriage she bore him five children. To alleviate her domestic drudgery and overwork she occasionally wrote stories so that she could afford domestic help, and in 1843 a collection of her New England stories, The Mayflower, was published by Harper.
This is a free page. This page contains 194 words. This
biography contains 3,724 words (approx. 12 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe Access Pass.
