Book review: Harriet Beecher Stowe: A
Spiritual Life
by Nancy Koester http://www.nancykoester.com/
William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 2014
371
pages, with index
If
this is your first exposure to Harriet Beecher Stowe, you’re in for a robust
telling of her story. From the first page to the last, you can’t doubt that
Stowe cared deeply about most aspects of private life, her faith and the
all-encompassing religious framework of the civitas.
As a woman in the mid-19th century, she was a zealous missionary
without portfolio.
Of
course Koester gives comprehensive analysis of the writing and impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was a best-seller
in the United States and in Great Britain. It moved multitudes to hate slavery
or hate Harriet Beecher Stowe. It did not, despite President Lincoln’s mocking
jest when he met Stowe at the White House, start “this great war.” It did help
to clarify existing polemical doctrines of opposing camps.
Koester’s
aim is to illuminate Stowe’s spiritual life and her very public commitment to
advocating her faith and the importance of religious observance and conviction.
If that’s not to your taste, reading this book will be drudgery. For me, it was
illuminating.
For
my taste, Koester mentions but does not usefully detail the context of other
aspects of Stowe’s life and impact on American society. She was a woman who
conspicuously did not abide by the social conventions that dictated a passive,
private, familial role for women. She wrote and was published extensively (I
was surprised to learn that she was a prolific writer, including novels, tracts
and political broadsides). She had lots of contact with the great and
near-great, including President Lincoln and Queen Victoria. Stowe more or less
supported her extended family with her writing—it would be interesting to know
how much money she made from her writing, because Stowe persisted in a socially
risky career and lifestyle that might have been unattainable without a
(relatively) high income. I suspect that Stowe was not one of the 99% in her
time.
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Koester
nobly attempts to make her case that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a mover and
shaker, non pareil, in the anti-slavery movement before, during and after the
Civil War. I suggest that this is a circumstantial biography of a notable lady
who was notably revered—and notably tolerated—by a great many of her
contemporaries.
If
the South had won the Civil War, I think it’s possible that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe, would be more than a tad less familiar to us.
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