Harriet Beecher Stowe had a profound effect on nineteenth-century culture and politics, not because her ideas were original, but because they were common. Somewhat paradoxically, she remains one of the most controversial writers America has produced. What makes Stowe so radical is that she insisted upon putting her ideas into action. As Jane Tompkins has written about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "Stowe's very conservatism-her reliance on established patterns of living and traditional beliefs -- is precisely what gives her novel its revolutionary potential."

Whether describing a trip by canal boat, the lawful brutalities of slavery, or the arrangements of a parlor, Stowe elevated the ordinary. Journalist, pamphleteer, novelist, preacher, domestic advice-giver, Stowe aimed to reach the broad mass of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters who read. She spoke for motherhood and the flag and apple pie, but she made her readers uncomfortable eating that pie unless others were eating it too. She used the written word as a vehicle for religious, social, and political purposes -- often mixing these with entertainment. Had she been a theologian or philosopher -- occupations effectively denied her because of her sex -- she would have poured her ideas into different molds. As it is, she often clothed her ideas in narrative form.

The object of this reader is to present a sampling of Stowe's literary production suggesting her range, rhetorical strategies, and cultural designs on the world. Selected with an eye to what will be useful in the classroom, the readings are divided into three categories: Early Sketches, Antislavery Writings, and Domestic Culture and Politics. There is inevitably some overlap among these categories. Early Sketches include the best work of her literary apprenticeship, pieces that chart important future directions. In Antislavery Writings, Uncle Tom's Cabin is included entire. Its brilliance and popularity have overshadowed the considerable body of antislavery writing Stowe produced. The section on Antislavery Writings restores Uncle Tom's Cabin to that body, and includes a generous selection from A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a companion volume to her novel. The section on Domestic Culture and Politics attempts to represent the range of her thinking on the Victorian home, for which she was a major propagandist. Both the complexity and political nature of this writing are suggested by the inclusion here of "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life." Stowe's expose of male debauchery and incest at the heart of the nineteenth-century home illustrates her willingness to take on the most challenging of social and political issues of her time.

Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, the seventh child of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote Beecher. One of the most famous clergymen of the early nineteenth century, Lyman Beecher was determined to have a role in shaping the culture of the new nation and was a powerful model for his children, most of whom had distinguished public careers as reformers, educators, and preachers. At a time when religion and politics were closely intertwined, all of Stowe's brothers became ministers. Early recognizing the genius of his daughter, Lyman Beecher remarked that he would give $100 if Harriet were a boy and Henry Ward a girl.

Stowe's mother was Roxana Foote of Guilford, Connecticut, who embodied what the nineteenth century thought of as "True Womanhood." She was as private and retiring as her husband was public and commanding. After bearing nine children, she died at the age of forty-one of tuberculosis -- not an unusual reward for the true woman of her time. Desiring the approbation of her famous father and yet loyal to the image of her perfectly self-denying and domestic mother, Stowe negotiated the boundary between the private and the public spheres through the act of writing. A woman picking up her pen in the privacy of the parlor did not depart from woman's conventional social role; yet when parlor writing was published, it reached a wide public and had the power to change the course of history.

Stowe was prepared for her career by an education which, in its rigor and classical depth, may be compared to that of her contemporary, Margaret Fuller. Like Fuller, Stowe studied Latin and was a precocious student. Both were drawn as young women to Madame de Stael Corinne -- a romantic antidote to their highly disciplined intellectual lives. But unlike Fuller, whose education took place at home under the instruction of her intensely demanding father, Stowe had the benefit of the moral and social atmosphere of two of the finest female seminaries in the nation.

At Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy, located one block from the Beecher parsonage, Harriet Beecher rubbed shoulders with girls from all over the United States, Canada, and the West Indies, thus obtaining a national experience rare for the time. Entering at age eight, she received an education roughly equivalent to that of a young man. Although Sarah Pierce taught music, dancing, singing, and embroidery -- the "ornamental" subjects demanded by parents who were concerned that their daughters be marriageable -- she also provided unusually thorough training in ancient and modern history and geography. With the addition to the staff of her nephew, John P. Brace, the curriculum was expanded to include chemistry, astronomy, botany, Latin, and moral philosophy. A typical course of study in Harriet Beecher's day was "Morse's Geography, Webster's Elements of English Grammar, Miss Pierce's History, Arithmetic through Interest, Blair's Lectures, Modern Europe, Ramsey's American Revolution, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Paley's Moral Philosophy, Hedge's Logic and Addison [i.e., Allison] on Taste." Sarah Pierce's educational goal was to teach the art of thinking, her larger purpose, to "vindicate the equality of female intellect." While she preached feminine modesty and prepared her students to embrace a conventional social role, her school was organized around a military model that stressed competition and prizes.

Stowe recalled particularly the excitement generated by John Brace, whose methods of teaching composition she later imitated as a teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary. Before asking his students to write on a subject, Brace first led lively discussions that brought various points of view to the fore. Reduced to its elements, his method was to convince students they had something to say before they took up their pens. Harriet Beecher was an eager writer in what Brace called this "literary loving school." Her first assignment was an essay on The Difference between the Natural and Moral Sublime -- a topic, Stowe noted, "not trashy or sentimental, such as are often supposed to be the style for female schools." At age nine she volunteered to write weekly essays; at age thirteen she won the honor of having her composition read aloud at the annual school exhibit, where it made her father sit up and ask who the author was. When the answer came, "Your daughter, sir," Stowe experienced what she later called "the proudest moment of my life."

That year, 1824, Harriet Beecher left Litchfield for Hartford, where she would stay until 1832, first as a student and then a teacher at the school founded by her sister. Under Catharine Beecher's leadership, the Hartford Female Seminary became a testing ground for women's "moral influence." It provided Harriet Beecher's first lectern and pulpit, an opportunity to test her power to influence others. In this women's culture Harriet Beecher tentatively tried out her vocations of teacher, preacher, and writer...