Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Harriet Beecher Stowe
-
Standard Name: Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Birth Name: Harriet Elizabeth Beecher
Married Name: Harriet Elizabeth Stowe
HBS
is best known for the highly sentimental and influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, although she also authored several other novels, short stories, children's stories, pamphlets, a good deal of journalism, and a biography of Lady Byron
(mother of the mathematician and scientist Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace
). Much of her journalism was evangelical in tone. HBS
's reputation peaked with Uncle Tom's Cabin, after which her cultural standing declined.
Each chapter begins with a religious epigraph. This novel recounts the story of the attractive nineteen-year-old bride, Lilian Grey, who makes a marriage above her social class with the aristocratic Basil Hope.
Worboise, Emma Jane. The Wife’s Trials; Married Life; Husbands and Wives. Garland, 1976.
Wife's Trials: 1-3, 9
Textual Production
Emma Jane Worboise
An article by EJW
published in the magazine in 1882 suggests that she received approximately 500 contributions a week.
Melnyk, Julie. “Emma Jane Worboise and The Christian World Magazine: Christian Publishing and Womens Empowerment”. Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol.
The Christian World Magazine featured women in positions of authority in a wide cross-section of nationalities, time periods, and religious denominations. For example Harriet Beecher Stowe
's series of articles ironically titled Portraits of the...
Education
Helen Waddell
HW
was, according to her editor Felicitas Corrigan
, [s]teeped in the Bible by heredity and upbringing.
Waddell, Helen. “Acknowledgements; Note; Introduction”. Between Two Eternities, edited by Felicitas Corrigan, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1993, pp. viii - ix, 1.
ix
Her feeling for religion was even stronger than her feeling for literature: when she first, at about...
Literary responses
Sojourner Truth
Harriet Beecher Stowe
published a tribute to ST
, Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl, in the Atlantic Monthly. This materially increased Truth's fame, while constructing her in a way she was not entirely happy with.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, and Nellie Y. McKay, editors. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Norton, 1997.
197, 199
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
239
Cultural formation
Sojourner Truth
Harriet Beecher Stowe
called STevidently a full-blooded African. Stowe responded to this idea in part aesthetically, calling her a fine . . . specimen of the torrid zone, rather like a living, breathing impersonation...
Friends, Associates
Sojourner Truth
ST
's vocation brought her into contact with many eminent people, from Abraham Lincoln
downwards. She shared a platform with Frederick Douglass
on a famous occasion when she challenged his faith by demanding whether God...
Textual Production
Frances Trollope
FT
drew on her American experiences to produce the anti-slaverynovelThe Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, fifteen years before Stowe
's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2024, 22 vols. plus supplements.
Ellis, Linda Abess. Frances Trollope’s America. Peter Lang, 1993.
139
Publishing
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
CET
's The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, featuring an introduction by Harriet Beecher Stowe
, was published in New York in three volumes.
Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth. M. W. Dodd, 1844, 3 vols.
prelims
Textual Features
Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna
Stowe
's introduction praises CET
's works as a safe and desirable acquisition in every christian [sic] and family library in our country.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. “Introduction”. The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Dodd, 1845, p. v - vii.
vii
She compares CET
's descriptions of factory life to those of...
Literary responses
Annie Tinsley
The story was thought, however, to derive from other books, both from Harriet Beecher Stowe
's Uncle Tom's Cabin and from Charlotte Brontë
's Villette. In an Advertisement to her next, anonymous novel, AT
Intertextuality and Influence
Annie S. Swan
She tells her own story briskly and dryly, with more humour than sentiment. This style comes into its own when relating the horrifying events on the home front during World War One. She concludes the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine de Staël
After completing this novel GS
wrote, I'd like a really big [writing] table, it seems to me I've got the right to it now.
qtd. in
Kobak, Annette. “Mme de Staël and Fanny Burney”. The Burney Journal, Vol.
4
, 2001, pp. 12-35.
19
Corinne was enormously influential for nineteenth-century women writers. The model...
Reception
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
CMS
received considerable critical and popular acclaim during her lifetime: Nathaniel Hawthorne
described her as our most truthful novelist,
qtd. in
Foster, Edward Halsey. Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Twayne, 1974.
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. A Victorian Art of Fiction, edited by John Charles Olmsted, Garland, 1979, pp. 277-98.
293
or Evangelical sub-species of fiction which George Eliot
distinguished in her notorious attack on the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic
Eliot, George. “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. A Victorian Art of Fiction, edited by John Charles Olmsted, Garland, 1979, pp. 277-98.
279
in Silly Novels...
Timeline
May 1819, May 1820: These months were scheduled for the removal...
National or international item
May 1819, May 1820
These months were scheduled for the removal of thousands of subsistence farmers and their families from the Highland estates of Lord and Lady Stafford (later the Duke
and Duchess of Sutherland
) in the Sutherland...
1852: In the wake of the success of Stowe's Uncle...
Writing climate item
1852
In the wake of the success of Stowe
's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Richard Hildreth
's retitled novel The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive appeared in an English edition with illustrations by Charles Kean
Spring 1852: Samuel Orchart Beeton (later the husband...
Building item
Spring 1852
Samuel Orchart Beeton
(later the husband of Isabella Mary Beeton) began publishing the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, which stimulated the spread of home dressmaking.
Palmer, Alan, and Veronica Palmer. The Chronology of British History. Century, 1992.
273
White, Cynthia L. Women’s Magazines 1693-1968. Michael Joseph, 1970.
Freeman, Sarah. Isabella and Sam: The Story of Mrs Beeton. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1977.
70-1, 75
Freeman, Sarah. Isabella and Sam: The Story of Mrs Beeton. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1977.
75-9, 133
21 March 1853: The thirty-year-old Matthew Arnold addressed...
Writing climate item
21 March 1853
The thirty-year-old Matthew Arnold
addressed to Arthur Hugh Clough
a classically misogynist letter about women writers, their works and their looks.
Borne Back Daily. 2001, http://borneback.com/ .
21 March 2008
April 1853: Stage performer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield,...
Building item
April 1853
Stage performer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield
, an ex-slave from Mississippi and the first Black concert singer to win fame in both the US and Britian, arrived in Liverpool.
Sanjek, Russell. American Popular Music and its Business. Oxford University Press, 1988.
219
9 November 1857: The first issue appeared of the US magazine...
Writing climate item
9 November 1857
The first issue appeared of the US magazine Atlantic Monthly. It set out to provide articles of an abstract and permanent value, while not ignoring the healthy appetite of the mind for entertainment in...
1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...
Writing climate item
1861
A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...
1864: Famous Girls who have become Illustrious...
Writing climate item
1864
Famous Girls who have become Illustrious Women: Forming Models for Imitation by the Young Women of England, a very popular book of biographical sketches by John M. Darton
, was published.
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
1868: Mary Abigail Dodge published Woman's Wrongs:...
