Harriet Beecher Stowe

STOWE, Harriet (Elizabeth) Beecher (née Beecher). b. Litchfield, Connecticut, 14 June 1811; d. Hartford, Connecticut, 1 July 1896. She was the daughter of a famous preacher, Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), and sister of another, Henry Ward Beecher*. She was educated at Litchfield, and then at the Hartford Female Seminary, run by her sister Catharine, where she later taught. In 1832 the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she met and married (1836) Calvin Ellis Stowe. The death of her son Samuel Charles (‘our boy of summer’) in a cholera epidemic of 1849 was a terrible blow: she wrote a poem of grief, ‘Below’, and another of part-consolation, ‘Above. A Vision’, about him. His death turned her...