First Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96) was a Beecher. It was her membership in that remarkable family, more than her marriage to the rather pale figure of Calvin Stowe, that molded and sustained her. Harriet Beecher shared and fully participated in the intellectual and religious environment of her father, Lyman Beecher's household. But Harriet's considerable adolescent academic and intellectual promise ran up against the hard fact that middle-class girls had nothing, no public role, toward which to point their education and their aspirations. Harriet's brothers could and did become clergyman. She and her sisters faced futures that promised little more than the status of wife and housekeeper. It is a tribute to Harriet's ambition and drive that she was able to fashion a public career out of domestic materials. Of particular importance to Harriet's developing sensibility was her leavening of the intellectual and religious activities of her father's household with the livelier, more sociable, and more active atmosphere of her maternal grandmother's house.

 Hedrick argues that Stowe's career as a writer emerged from the "parlor culture" of domestic space: the round of conversation, letters, readings and informal literary clubs with which the improving middle class-men and women-passed their leisure time. These activities kept Harriet's eye sharp and allowed her to practice writing. It was an easy and logical step up and out into the public press so Stowe began publishing her small domestic tales and pieces in the periodical press. Inevitably, her family's involvement in American reform movements, especially abolitionism, filtered its way into Stowe's writing. Always, however, she maintained the bridge between wider societal concerns and the felt life of recognizable individuals; combining, in a sense, the worlds of the two houses in which she had grown up. The motive for Uncle Tom's Cabin came from her grief over the death of her own infant son and her imaginative sensibility's desire to show how such human feeling was present even among the "lowly." It was Stowe's ability to humanize (or "sentimentalize" as her critics would have it) the crimes of slavery that gave her novel its power.

 And shrewd observers, both North and South, realized that if Stowe's text was slavery, her subtext was the exercise and abuse of power in the family. The arguments made against the South's peculiar, patriarchal institution could easily be extended to indict the North's own patriarchal institution: the Victorian family. If the Civil War settled the question of the rights of man, the postbellum period would make the rights of woman central to social reform and to Harriet Beecher Stowe's writing. This section of Hedrick's biography is fascinating because it reveals how Stowe was caught in and limited by an ideology centered on the middle-class home. While the theory and practice of the Victorian family proved an excellent lens with which to anatomize the crimes of slavery, Stowe could not apply the family analogy to the family itself. Turned back on herself, Stowe's fiction stuttered and she ultimately turned to biographical exposé, writing Lady Byron Vindicated, a tract which only succeeded in outraging "proper" Americans with its details of Byron's alleged incest. Conversely, Stowe found few friends on the left since she could not seriously consider the radical proposal that marriage (like the analogous crime of slavery) be abolished. Stowe's ability to speak on women's issues was finally and fatally hamstrung by the feminist Victoria Woodhull's attack on Henry Ward Beecher which precipitated his trials for adultery.

 Stowe's Lady Byron is interesting for its delineation of a counterlife of powerlessness which its author must have feared terribly. Early in her career, newly married and in a new residence, Stowe literally constructed "a room of own's own" in which to work and she took assiduous care throughout her life that she receive the financial and literary credit she felt her work deserved. While Hedrick documents Stowe's family life, she could have done more to speculate on the psychological costs of Stowe's ambition and success: the recessiveness and ineffectualness of Calvin Stowe, the drug and alcohol problems of her children, the use of her adult daughters as housekeepers, and so on. Hedrick occasionally makes too much of Stowe's disadvantaged status as a middle-class woman. At one point, discussing Stowe's status as a professional writer, Hedrick makes the analogy that if Stowe was not a domestic slave "she never escaped being a slave to her pen." This rhetorical flourish, which comes close to being odious, obscures Stowe's conflicted role in America's middle-class culture and with its reference to the slave's powerlessness underestimates Stowe's own agency in the construction of her life.

 Hedrick makes the point that at the outset of Stowe's career the literary culture was sufficiently fluid and inclusive to allow women to publish. But as Stowe's career progressed she ran up against an increasingly professionalized authorial and literary class that disparaged, in Hawthorne's words, "the damn'd mob of scribbling women." This process of professionalization, Hedrick argues, rendered women authors either marginal or excluded them altogether from the emerging canon and its aesthetic. This is important but Hedrick's account, possibly foreshortened because she has to cover so much, lacks nuance. Hedrick reduces the process of literary professionalization to a gender conspiracy. There was an element of male exclusivity, but what is interesting is the divided and conflicting impulses which kept separated the spheres of feminine and masculine society, private and public space. Hedrick writes of the awkward dinner meeting of women authors with the literary lions of the Atlantic in July 1859. But she misses the point that the male authors did include their female counterparts. The meeting foundered because neither group could break through the carapace of Victorian social and gender roles. It would take more than literature to break down those roles but literature, as in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, could do much to transcend the limits imposed on 19th-century men and women.