"Harriet Beecher Stowe" Book Review

Harriet Beecher Stowe by Suzanne M. Coil
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The engrossing story of the imaginative and extraordinarily intelligent author of the American classic Uncle Tom's Cabin and more than 30 other books.

No one's body of work represents the phrase, "The pen is mightier than the sword" more than Harriet Beecher Stowe. When she met President Lincoln in 1862, he allegedly said to her, "So you're the little lady who wrote the book that made this great war."

Ms. Stowe is a fascinating person and has an even more interesting family that I did not know had been famous in her time. It's odd to read about her almost puritanical life and realize that she existed at the same time as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. In fact, she loved Lord Byron, but she hadn't yet started writing before he died.

I had read Uncle Tom's Cabin a few years ago while in college. It was a great book and I'm glad to have finally read about the author. I hadn't realized she was so prolific and that she had written other books and many articles.

She was a pretty strong person in her family as well. She wasn't always the bread winner, or at least not until her book sold. But she held the family together and was the smarter than her husband at times.

It sort of annoyed me that people slandered her after she described Lord Byron as the loathsome creature he was. She had become friends with his widow, and when her friend died some people said foul things about her, so in retaliation and also to spread the truth around, she wrote articles describing the kinds of things he had done or that it wasn't her friends he acted that way. Last year, I had read a short biography about Byron and he is a terrible person and I would go so far as to say that he was probably a sociopath. But enough about that....

While this is a short biography, about 200 pages long or so, I would say that it was just long enough to maintain my interest, but any longer and it would have been fairly boring. It was written with a young audience in mind. It has a pretty decent selection of pictures of the author and her family. While I wouldn't read more about her, I would certainly read more of her work. I would also read about her siblings, especially Henry Ward Beecher, a preacher who stood for equal rights for woman and the abolishment of slavery.

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4 out of 5 Beecher preachers.