by Angella Gailey

Created on: December 05, 2011   Last Updated: December 08, 2011

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut to Rev. Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) and Roxanna Foote Beecher (1775-1816). She was the sixth of eleven children. Her father was a controversial Calvinist preacher, her mother passed away when she was five years old. Her oldest sister Catherine became a maternal influence. At age seven, she won a school essay contest that would also earn her praise from her father. Even at a young age, Harriet believed her purpose in life was to write.

Her father would re-marry to Harriet Porter Beecher (1800-1835), adding her three children to Lyman’s eight, bringing the total number of children to eleven. Most of these eleven children would go on to do great things. All seven sons became ministers, Catherine (the oldest daughter), would pioneer education for women, and Isabella (the youngest daughter) would found the National Women’s Suffrage Association. As children, they would play, read, hike, and join their father in games and exercises, things she would later incorporate into Pogunuc People (1878), her last novel.

Harriet’s aunt, Harriet Foote, deeply influenced her thinking. Her uncle, Samuel Foote, encouraged her to read, focusing on the works of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. When she was growing up, the Beechers would take in boarders from Tapping Reeve’s Law school, allowing Harriet to hone her talent in debate. She would begin her formal education at Sarah Pierce’s academy, where she could peruse academic studies as opposed to ornamental arts.

In 1824, Harriet became the first student at her sister’s Hartford Female Seminary, where she would spend many hours composing essays. She began teaching there four years later, when she was only fifteen, and she would continue teaching there until her family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her sister would found the Western Female Institute. She would also write a children’s geography book, and also started her writing career after winning a prize contest of the Western Monthly Magazine, where she became a regular contributor of stories and essays. The Western Monthly Magazine would also publish her first book, which would first appear in 1843.

While in Cincinnati, Stowe found the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She lived across the river from the slave trade and she saw many incidents that would motivate her to write the anti-slavery novel.

This is also where she met and married a widower,

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