Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life
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Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life  -     By: Nancy Koester

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. / 2013 / Paperback

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Product Description

Life story of the prolific Christian author of Uncle Tom's Cabin

"So you're the little woman who started this big war," Abraham Lincoln is said to have quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin converted readers by the thousands to the anti-slavery movement and served notice that slavery's days were numbered. Overnight Stowe became a celebrity, but to defenders of slavery she was the devil in petticoats.

Most writing about Stowe treats her as a literary figure and social reformer while underplaying her Christian faith. But Nancy Koester's biography treats Stowe's faith as central to her life - both her public fight against slavery and her own struggle through deep personal grief to find a gracious God.

Product Information

Title: Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life
By: Nancy Koester
Format: Paperback
Vendor: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Publication Date: 2013
Weight: 1 pound 3 ounces
ISBN: 0802833047
ISBN-13: 9780802833044
Series: Library of Religious Biography (LRB)
Stock No: WW833044

Publisher's Description

"So you're the little woman who started this big war," Abraham Lincoln is said to have quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin converted readers by the thousands to the anti-slavery movement and served notice that the days of slavery were numbered. Overnight Stowe became a celebrity, but to defenders of slavery she was the devil in petticoats.

Most writing about Stowe treats her as a literary figure and social reformer while downplaying her Christian faith. But Nancy Koester's biography highlights Stowe’s faith as central to her life -- both her public fight against slavery and her own personal struggle through deep grief to find a gracious God. Having meticulously researched Stowe’s own writings, both published and un-published, Koester traces Stowe's faith pilgrimage from evangelical Calvinism through spiritualism to Anglican spirituality in a flowing, compelling narrative.

Author Bio

 
Nancy Koester holds a PhD in church history and has taught at both the college and seminary levels. She is ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Her work focuses on nineteenth-century American history, especially the antislavery movement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. She is inspired by women of that era who, though lacking basic rights, found ways to move the nation closer to its own ideals. Koester's 2013 publication with Eerdmans, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life, won the Minnesota Book Award in 2015 in General Nonfiction. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband Craig.

Endorsements

The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent clergymen and theologians, Harriet Beecher Stowe outshone them all in her impact on American religion and reform. Her life and work were framed by a spiritual quest that led from her ancestral Calvinism to high-church Episcopalianism and even spiritualism. Nancy Koester's lucid narrative and penetrating analysis carry the reader along unfailingly on this fascinating quest.
-James M. McPherson,
Pulitzer Prize winner for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was in her lifetime the most famous and influential woman in the United States, bar none. But she has been largely forgotten today. Nancy Koester's comprehensive biography brings Stowe's personal story to life for a new generation while re-creating the fierce religious and cultural battles that inspired her to write the Great American Novel that helped turn the course of American history.
-Debby Applegate,
Pulitzer Prize winner for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

An accessible and absorbing interpretive biography...Koester engagingly and intelligently discusses each major novel, each family crisis, each journey, and each spiritual change, including a fluctuating interest in spiritualism after the deaths of two of [Stowe's] sons, without a whiff of academic fustiness. A top-notch read.
-Booklist (starred review)

Editorial Review

When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe during the United States Civil War, he reportedly quipped, "So you're the little woman who started this big war." In Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life, Nancy Koester presents a biography of the famed author of Uncle Tom's Cabin that bounds with delight from page to page. The book is easily accessible to a popular audience and moves chronologically through her life and the lives of those closest to her, yet is thoroughly researched and offers rich sources for the interested academic. While the book is driven by events more than a thesis, it is a thoroughly spiritual biography focused upon Harriet's faith, as one would expect from a book in the Library of Religious Biography series. Though Harriet's relationship to Jesus changed over time, it always shaped her, her writings, and her advocacy for social reform in profound ways.

More than simply following Harriet (as the author prefers to call her), Koester weaves her story into the stories of her hugely influential Beecher family and her social milieu, and so touches upon the social and spiritual state of many average Americans of that time. The story begins with a glimpse of Harriet's parents, Roxana Foote Beecher and the indefatigable pastor Lyman Beecher. Harriet quickly emerges as a precocious writer - even at age nine - steeped in her father's Congregationalist theology. Like her siblings, she yearns for conversion and peace with God. Moving from Litchfield, Connecticut, to Boston, and then to Cincinnati, Harriet continues wrestling with God as she becomes an adult, an uneasiness that continues into her marriage with Calvin Stowe. Ultimately, though, she finds increasing peace when she decides to quit striving and rely upon God's grace. Her initial anxiety at being a woman involved in public advocacy gradually fades, beginning with an anonymous letter to the editor against a race riot mob and culminating in Uncle Tom's Cabin, her 1852 protest novel woven together from stories she had heard throughout her life. Her novel rekindled the consciences of Northerners against the evil of slavery and made her an international celebrity meeting with figures such as Charles Dickens and the queen of England. Yet she also faced the all-too-human difficulties of quarrels with and concern for her extended family and of spiritual struggles - including her rejection of Calvinism, dabbling in spiritualism, and eventual embrace of Episcopalism. Despite these challenges, Harriet continued writing and advocating social reform throughout her life.

This book, if a bit overlong for its many details and rabbit trails, is a delight to read. The prose prances with crisp sentences, playful extended metaphors, and lively italics and exclamation points. One hardly notices that it skips upon an immense scholarly foundation, as evidenced by more than one thousand footnotes throughout the book. Koester treats religion sensitively and places the narrative firmly in the center of Harriet's and many others' lives, a refreshing contrast to much mainstream scholarship that either ignores religion or reduces it to expressions of other motives. She avoids overly simplistic categories of heroes and villains by helping readers understand her various subjects, whether old-school Calvinists, Episcopalians, troubled seekers, rationalists, or spiritualists. Harriet's siblings, such as the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, adopted more liberal versions of Christianity than their father Lyman, but all made major contributions to society and respected their evangelical past. For example, Harriet's sister Catharine was a major innovator in women's education who, though unconverted herself, nonetheless encouraged revival in order to make her students better citizens. Rather than simply making a book about one woman, Koester touches upon the spiritual climate of New England, and, to some extent, the nation, during this period, and skillfully uses a religiously attuned biography to delve into the soul of an era.

Koester discusses the irony that Harriet's antislavery activism in the form of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was successful in part because the culture viewed her critique as emotional rather than rational, and therefore appropriate for a woman in the 1850s. Yet, her fiery response to those who attacked Uncle Tom's Cabin as inaccurate produced a brilliant - and thoroughly rational - response in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book documenting that the actual conditions of slavery were far worse than in her fictional novel. Undaunted by her critics and encouraged to write and travel by her supportive husband and family, Harriet shines as an example for women determined to fight injustices today. I encourage you to buy and read Koester's brilliant book, which shows the importance of religious convictions for social reformation and the power of a woman, even in a patriarchal society, to change herself and the world.


---Brendan Payne, a History PhD candidate at Baylor University
---Used with permission from Christians for Biblical Equality

Editorial Reviews

The Gospel Coalition
"Phenomenal. . . . A marvelous introduction to everything from the history of the Western Reserve and Ohio Valley to the nature of antebellum sectionalism and political conflict to the often-contested ground of gender roles in American culture."

Stone Campbell Journal
"Koester succeeds admirably in producing an engaging narrative in which Stowe remains a dynamic woman both a product of her context and a person who sought the deepest possible relationship with God."

The Historian
"Koester's detailed narrative offers a more comprehensive and theologically sophisticated picture of Stowe's developing religious views. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written."

James M. McPherson
— Pulitzer Prize winner for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
"The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent clergymen and theologians, Harriet Beecher Stowe outshone them all in her impact on American religion and reform. Her life and work were framed by a spiritual quest that led from her ancestral Calvinism to high-church Episcopalianism and even spiritualism. Nancy Koester's lucid narrative and penetrating analysis carry the reader along unfailingly on this fascinating quest."

Debby Applegate
— Pulitzer Prize winner for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
"It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was in her lifetime the most famous and influential woman in the United States, bar none. But she has been largely forgotten today. Nancy Koester's comprehensive biography brings Stowe's personal story to life for a new generation while re-creating the fierce religious and cultural battles that inspired her to write the Great American Novel that helped turn the course of American history."

Booklist (STARRED review)
"The subject of this accessible and absorbing interpretive biography was perhaps the most famous American woman of the nineteenth century. . . . Koester engagingly and intelligently discusses each major novel, each family crisis, each journey, and each spiritual change, including a fluctuating interest in spiritualism after the deaths of two of her sons, without a whiff of academic fustiness. A top-notch read."

Choice (American Library Association)
"This biography by Koester provides a well-versed, comprehensive account of the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. . . . Koester balances Stowe's literary and social work alongside concise reflections on her religious and spiritual changes. . . . Recommended."

Congregational Libraries Today
"A fascinating biography of the abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. . . . Koester presents all the facts of Stowe's life in a volume that is scholarly and extremely well annotated, yet written in a lively style."

Presbyterian Outlook
"Nancy Koester's superb biography portrays Stowe in all her varying colors, from the fiery hues of the abolitionist reformer to the soft pastels of the fully engaged mother and wife."

Christian Century
"Koester has accessibly translated an exemplary 19th-century life for a 21st-century audience. Her Stowe is a women to be admired and emulated but who also is recognizable to today's readers in her struggles to find a balance between her work and her spiritual life."

Fides et Historia
"One of the strengths of this biography is Koester's adeptness at conveying the experiences and emotions that shaped Stowe's devotional life and faith-informed activism. . . . Koester's writing is accessible and she encourages the reader to identify with her subject. Her sympathetic portrayal of Stowe's inner life dares the reader to ask how they would confront the same questions she faced. This quality makes the book a helpful introduction to the time period or a good springboard for undergraduate class discussions."

Anglican and Episcopal History
"Koester's study provides a model analysis of life-long growth in faith and grace."

Presbyterian History
"Presents readers with a woman who used what she had in skills and position to live as a follower of Jesus Christ. Readers will be rewarded for reading this biography."

Journal of Southern History
"Koester's often intimate portrait of Stowe's spirituality is both engagingly and clearly written . . . . General audiences interested in Stowe's religious life will likely enjoy Koester's account of Stowe's spiritual journey and learn something about nineteenth-century American history in the process."

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