STOWE, HARRIET ELIZABETH (BEECHER) (1811 1896), American writer and philanthropist, seventh child of Lyman and Roxana (Foote) Beecher, was born at Litchfield (Conn.), June 14, 1811. Her parents were descended from founders of New Haven; and the community in which she spent her childhood was one of the most intellectual in New England. At her mother's death, in 1815, she came most directly under the influence of her eldest sister, Catherine, a woman of keen in tellect, who a few years later set up a school in Hartford, to which Harriet went, first as a pupil, afterwards as teacher. In 1832 her father, who had for six years been the pastor of a church in Boston, accepted the presidency of the newly-founded Lane Theological seminary at Cincinnati. Catherine Beecher, who was eager to establish what should be in effect a pioneer college for women, accompanied him ; and with her went Harriet as an assistant, taking an active part in the literary and school life, contributing stories and sketches to local journals, and. com piling a school geography. She was married Jan. 6, 1836, to one of the professors in the seminary, Calvin Ellis Stowe. In the midst of privation and anxiety, due largely to her husband's pre carious health, she wrote continually, and in 1843 published The Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. She lived 18 years in Cincinnati, separated only by the Ohio river from a slave-holding community, coming in contact with fugitive slaves, and learning from friends and her own visits the life of the South. When, therefore, in 185o, Mr. Stowe was elected to a professorship in Bowdoin col lege, Brunswick (Me.), and removed his family thither, Mrs. Stowe was prepared for the great work which came to her, bit by bit, as a religious message which she must deliver. There she wrote, for serial publication in the National Era, an anti-slavery paper of Washington (D.C.), the story of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. The publication in book form ( March 20, 1852) was a factor which must be reckoned in sum ming up the moving causes of the Civil War. The book sprang into unexampled popularity, and was translated into at least 23 languages. Mrs. Stowe reinforced her story with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which she accumulated a large number of docu ments and testimonies against the great evil; and in 1853 she made a journey to Europe, devoting herself especially to creat ing an entente cordiale between English and American women on the question. In 1856 she published Dred: a Tale of the Dismal
Swamp, in which she threw the weight of her argument on the deterioration of a society resting on a slave basis. The establish ment of the Atlantic Monthly, in 1857, gave her a constant ve hicle for her writings; also the Independent of New York, and later the Christian Union, of which papers successively her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was one of the editors.
From this time she led the life of a woman of letters, writing novels, of which The Minister's Wooing (1859) is best known, and many studies of social life in the form both of fiction and essay. Her Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), Sarah Orne Jewett credited with having revealed to her the literary value of the country folk. Mrs. Stowe published also a small volume of re ligious poems, and towards the end of her career gave some public readings from her writings. In 1852 Prof. Stowe accepted a professorship in the Theological seminary at Andover (Mass.), and the family made its home there till 1863, when he retired wholly from professional life and removed to Hartford. After the close of the war for the Union, Mrs. Stowe bought an estate in Florida, chiefly in hope of restoring the health of her son, Capt. Frederick Beecher Stowe, who had been wounded in the war, and there she spent many winters. After the death of her husband in 1886, she lived in the seclusion of her Hartford home, where she died on July 1, 2896. She is buried by the side of her husband at Andover.
See the Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897) which were edited by Annie Fields. Recent lives are C. E. and L. B. Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe: the Story of Her Life (191I), and a biography for girls (1913) by Martha F. Crow. See also "Harriet Beecher Stowe" in John Erskine's Leading American Novelists (1910). The Riverside edition of Mrs. Stowe's works was published in 1899 and 1906 in 16 volumes (with an additional volume of biography). (H. E. S.)