January 26

Cora Sue and I bought our dresses, which Grandma thought were very good value once she had looked at the workmanship in them. It would have taken an enormous effort to make a similar dress, so it was well worth the money, we thought.

We had already decided what to pack for our big trip which would begin in only four days time, but we still had to go to school and live in the real world until then.

I was nervous going into the English class, as no doubt we would be getting our Introductions back, with comments on them. But when the class finally came at the end of the day, I found that mine had only a tick on it, no comments at all. I was both relieved and disappointed.

But the one that Miss Marble thought was the very best she wanted read out in class, and that was Albertina’s one on Harriet Beecher Stowe. I couldn’t see what was so good about it, as she read it out to us.

Introduction

For my essay I have chosen to write about Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe who was born on June 14th, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut and later in 1832, she lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. She brought to the attention of the general public, especially of the North where there were no slaves, the cruelty of slavery.

Equally her work angered the people in the South who felt she had not presented the situation fairly. The impact of the book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, widened the breech between the two sections. In fact, Mr. Abraham Lincoln said of her, “So you’re the little woman who started this great war.”

But going back to her childhood, she was the seventh child of the Protestant minister, Lyman Beecher, who was very anti-slavery in his sermons. Harriet worked as a student and later a teacher with her older sister Catharine at Hartford Female Seminary.
 
In 1836, Harriet married Calvin Stowe, a clergyman and widower. Later she and her husband moved to Brunswick, Maine, when he obtained an academic position at Bowdoin College.

Harriet and Calvin had seven children, but some died in early childhood. Her first children, twin girls Hattie and Eliza, were born on September 29, 1836. Four years later, in 1840, her son Frederick William was born. In 1848 the birth of Samuel Charles occurred, but in the following year, he died from a cholera epidemic.

She helped to support her family financially by writing for local and religious periodicals. She has written poems, travel books, biographical sketches, and children's books, as well as adult novels and she is still writing now.
 
While she wrote at least ten adult novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe is predominantly known for her first, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Begun as a serial for the Washington anti-slavery weekly, the National Era, it focused public interest on the issue of slavery, and was deeply controversial.

In writing the book, she drew on her personal experience: she was familiar with slavery, the antislavery movement, and the underground railroad because Kentucky was across the Ohio River from Cincinnati Ohio where Mrs. Stowe had lived, was a slave state.

Following publication of the book, she became a celebrity, speaking against slavery both in America and Europe. She wrote A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) extensively documenting the realities on which the book was based, to refute critics who tried to argue that it was inauthentic; and published a second anti-slavery novel, Dred in 1856. 

Both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred, a Tale of the Dismal Swamp were made into plays.

The historical significance of Mrs. Stowe's antislavery writing has tended to draw attention away from her other work, and from her work's literary significance. Mrs. Stowe was an early and effective realist. Her settings are often accurately and described in detail. Her portraits of local social life, particularly with minor characters, reflect an awareness of the complexity of the culture she lived in, and an ability to communicate that culture to others.