About this item
"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.
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And there the similarities end, for Harriet was brilliant and famous, a nineteenth century woman through and through and I am none of those things. Too much identification is dangerous for an historian, because it can make you see what you want to see instead of what is really there. And yet, if you are going to spend years of your life working on someone, there has to be something that draws you to that person. In the end, you can never completely know another person, especially someone who died before you were born. And yet. Time travelers often find that "objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear."
