Harriet Beecher Stowe

1811-1896

H. B. Stowe was born in Lichfield Connecticut to the family of a pastor. In 1832, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Harriet became interested in the abolitionist case. There she met and married in 1836 Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor of theology. They lived for some time in the South where Mrs. Stowe carefully studied the life of Negro slaves and white plantators. Her best and most popular novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin", was the reflection of southern life. Her literary contemporaries spoke of the book as of the high-water mark, to which her genius never rose again. The novel made a great stir all over the world by its realistic descriptions of Negro slavery in the USA. Harriet Beecher Stowe was not an abolitionist herself but her book helped the abolitionist agitator to promote the antislavery movement.

To prove the truth of her descriptions in the novel H. B. Stowe published in 1853 a collection of documents on which her story in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was based. It was the book called "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin". Another antislavery novel "Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp", appeared in 1865, the last year of the Civil War. The other novels written during the 60's and 70's dealt with everyday life of the "average" New Englanders. "The Minister's Wooling" (1859) or "My Wife and I" (1871) were not of great social importance, but one can easily notice their artistic merits-their quiet humor and pure style. Marked with sentimental, even melodramatic, touch, full of religious moralization, the novels of H. B. Stowe demonstrated, however, the mixture of romantic and realistic features, the transition from romanticism to realism and. thus, the beginning of social novel in American fiction. [68]

The process mentioned was closely connected with the "'local colour movement", a term, which simply meant writing about life in particular, usually provincial, locality. An "old town" of England was such "locality" for H. B. Stowe, and her "Old-Town Folks", a truthful, sympathetic and skilful record of a small-town life, may serve as an example of such literature.