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Philip McFarland
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Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe Kindle Edition

by Philip McFarland (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.3 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
The author of Hawthorne in Concord “brings [Stowe] to life in all her glory, in a book at once so dramatic and so subtle that it rivals the best fiction” (Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America).
 
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced an ambivalent North to confront the atrocities of slavery, yet it was just one of many accomplishments of the Beechers, the most eminent American family of the nineteenth century.
 
Historian Philip McFarland follows the Beecher clan to the boomtown of Cincinnati, where Harriet’s glimpses of slavery across the Kentucky border moved her to pen Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We meet Harriet’s loves: her father Lyman, her husband Calvin, and her brother Henry, the most famous preacher of his time. As McFarland leads us through Harriet’s ever-changing world, he traces the arc of her literary career from her hard-scrabble beginnings to her ascendancy as the most renowned author of her day.
 
Through the portrait of a defining American family, Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe opens into an unforgettable rendering of mid-nineteenth century America in the midst of unprecedented social and demographic explosions. To this day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin reverberates as a crucial document in Western culture.
 
“Often dismissed even by her admirers as a pious faculty wife who just happened to write the book of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe emerges in Philip McFarland’s biography in all her complexity and genius.” —Charles Calhoun, author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life and The Gilded Age
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  1. Print length
    335 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Grove Press
  4. Publication date
    November 18, 2008
  5. File size
    4.1 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Despite the racy title, McFarland (Hawthorne in Concord) has not penned a salacious tell-all about Harriet Beecher Stowe's romantic life, but rather a fairly unremarkable biography of Stowe and the whole Beecher family. Though ostensibly organized around the three men important to Harriet—her father, her brother and her husband—the device is really just a gimmick that leads to confusing departures from chronology, as when McFarland summarizes the childhood of Harriet's father halfway through the book. The most perceptive sections deal with Stowe's literary career. McFarland argues that Poganuc People is her most coherent work, and that Uncle Tom's Cabin, the abolitionist novel that made Stowe an international star, was born in part out of her experience as a mother: when her young son died, Stowe was sensitized to the plight of slave mothers separated from their children. This narrative is sure to be overshadowed by Debby Applegate's Pulitzer Prize–winning study of Stowe's brother, The Most Famous Man in America (2006); Joan Hedrick's Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1994), to which McFarland acknowledges his debt, will remain definitive. (Nov. 10)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The best-known member of the remarkable Beecher family was Harriet. She was, of course, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a widely praised and widely attacked novel that alerted many indifferent Northerners to the evils of chattel slavery. But she was a member of a clan that produced other prominent and historically significant figures. McFarland offers interesting profiles of family members that reveal much about them as well as providing a useful snapshot of antebellum northern society. Harriet's father, Lyman, was a fiery, emotional preacher whose sermons attacked Unitarians, Catholics, and alcoholics, but he was reticent concerning the raging topic of slavery. One of his 13 children, Henry, was Harriet's closest sibling and one of the most influential and eloquent preachers of the nineteenth century. Like Harriet, he was an ardent abolitionist, and he also campaigned for women's suffrage and even tried to reconcile scripture with the emerging science of evolution. Harriet's public career is well known, but McFarland paints a touching portrait of her personal life, particularly regarding her 50-year marriage to Calvin Stowe. Freeman, Jay

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0074A6K0I
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grove Press; Reprint edition (November 18, 2008)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 18, 2008
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4.1 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 335 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

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Philip McFarland

Philip McFarland

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4.3 out of 5 stars
5 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Marcus Boggs
    5.0 out of 5 stars Loves
    Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2007
    Every American should read this book. It came to me as a gift, and, to be frank, I took it up reluctantly. I mean, who wants to read about a sanctimonious busybody, once influential, now largely forgotten but for her famous book fluttered before your face in junior high? Within pages, that question became its opposite: who doesn't? Having picked the book up, I couldn't put it down. The story is utterly absorbing, filled with passion, filled with pathos - religious fervor, Civil War, its prelude, its aftermath, the Gilded Age. It is the story of public triumph - that famous book again, plus many others - and private grief - the drowning of a beloved son, the disappearance of another in San Francisco, pursued by demons, the trials of a famous brother. The writing is brilliant, even breathtaking, like some wild Disney ride, but that is not what distinguishes the book. What does is the organization of voices, events, incidents, themes. All are woven into a seamless tapestry made up of many, many intensely colored threads. The rush of narative delights, but ultimately it is the intricate pattern that holds your attention. A perfect giift for anyone interested in 19 c. America.

    PS Ignore that foolish review in PW.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • Dark Romantic
    3.0 out of 5 stars Not as good as I imagined
    Reviewed in the United States on July 23, 2010
    Verified Purchase
    I should begin by noting I knew very little of Harriet Beecher Stowe before I read this book. As an introduction, it was a difficult read. The narrative is disjointed, out of order, and often takes divergent turns (the latter few chapters are almost exclusively focused on Stowe's scandalized brother Henry Ward Beecher); though many of these extended digressions are interesting, they often push Stowe herself to the background. The author is not to blame for some of the confusion I had, however; Stowe was part of a massive extended family, from brothers and sisters to cousins and her own extensive crop of offspring and their spouses and children- it was often difficult to keep them straight. Further, I haven't read any of Stowe's fiction and have only a passing understanding of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - again, my lack of background is my fault, not his (in fact, I thank him for describing some of her more interesting works beyond "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and I am inspired to look up a few of her more domestic works). McFarland is a good writer, and some of his prose shines with near-poetic beauty (particularly the last few paragraphs of this novel). However, he also made some odd choices in his storytelling for this book, frequently referring back to what he had already said or warning us of what was soon to come. The author's own narrative voice became somewhat distracting at times.

    With that said, the worst complaint I have about this book is that I had higher expectations. Having read McFarland's "Hawthorne in Concord," I hoped for a book just as enthralling. I can't judge the writing of "The Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe" without comparing it to this earlier book. "Hawthorne in Concord" is one of the greatest literary biographies I have ever read. It's a shame this biography of Stowe wasn't as great. One point worth closing with: the best part of the book was McFarland's description of the contemporary monetary success of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" coupled with its current criticism and the stigma of the "Uncle Tom" archetype. McFarland successfully describes the problem with that vein of criticism, mostly because those critics are misinformed with respect to Stowe's major novel.
    3 people found this helpful
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