contains repros of her paintings;
8: on marriage to Calvin: confessed on eve of wedding in 1836 to a friend she felt 'nothing at all.'; Calvin had no faculty to cope (faculty being defined as the opposite of shiftlessness?) "He also had an eye for pretty women, as he admitted to Hattie, and a taste for spirits, but these proclivities, it seems, never got him into any particular trouble." saw imaginary characters, including a friendly face called Harvey. notes his being absent on birth of twins, taking the cure longer than Hattie;
9: he complained in his letters about her messing up the Newspaper and not writing interesting letters; in the ten years at Cincinnati, he was away 3 1/2; "if you were not already my husband I should certainly fall in love with you..." notes her working at the kitchen table (see Kirkland), confusinon all around, a baby in a clothes basket at her feet. Couldn't spell well; "She dreamed of a place to work without "the constant falling of soot and coal dust on everything in the room."
79: In 1849, while Calvin was away, she had to watch Charlie die of Cholera; then when they left Cincinnati, she had do all the work herself; enjoyed the journey; story of arrival in Brunswick: "On the day they were scheduled to arrive at Brunswick, one story goes, the president of Bowdoin sent a professor named Smith down to greet the new faculty wife, but Smith returned disappointed, saying she must have been delayed. Nobody got off the boat, he said, except an old Irish woman and her brats."
80: quotes response go Sister-in-laws urging that she write something against slavery: "As long as the baby sleeps with me nights, I can't do much at anything, but I will do it at last. I will write that thing if I live."
"The book had a strange power over almost everyone who read it then, and for all its Victorian mannerisms and frequent patches of sentimentality much of [it] still does. Its characters have a vitality of a kind comparable to the most memorable figures in literature. There is sweep and power to the narrative, and there are scenes that once read are not forgotten. The book is also rather different from what most people imagine, largely because it was eventually eclipsed by the stage version."
book made people feel what slavery was about.
in time Uncle Tom took on a new meaning: quotes American Heritage Dictionary "A Negro who is held to be humiliatingly subservient or deferential to whites." not what HBS intended for her black Christ figure;
78: later career, one novel a year; wrote under assumed name, Christopher Crowfield also; 1869, attacked Byron and defended Lady Byron when Byron's mistress's memoirs were published;
79: tragedy: Henry drowns in 1857; soldier son Frederick is an alcoholic and is lost somewhere in San Fransisco ca. 1870; brother Henry Ward Beecher accused of playing around with a parishioner in 1872; stood by Henry even if half sister Isabella did not; became an Episcopalian and loved Florida where she invested in a cotton plantation and an orange grove;
80: gradually slipped into senility; at 82 wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes: "I make no mental effort any sort; my brain is tired out. It was a woman's brain and not a man's, and finally from sheer fatigue and exhaustion in the march and strife of life it gave out before the end was reached. And now I rest me, like a moored boat, rising and falling on the water, with loosened cordage and flapping sail."
quotes a 'years earlier' observation that "If there had been a grand preparatory blast of trumpets or had it been announced that Mrs. Stowe would do this or that, I think it likely I could not have written; but nobody expected anything ... and so I wrote freely."
she died near midnight on July 1, 1896; Calvin, who had written a successful book on the history of the bible had died 10 years before on August 6, 1886;
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