Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe
by Forrest Wilson
Summary
Forrest Wilson's biography follows Harriet Beecher Stowe from a childhood at the center of one of nineteenth century America's most consequential religious families, the sixth of Reverend Lyman Beecher's eleven children and sister to the famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher, through her 1836 marriage to biblical scholar Calvin Stowe and into the domestic life of a mother who buried an eighteen month old son to cholera in Cincinnati, a loss biographers have long connected to the empathy for a mother torn from her child that drives Uncle Tom's Cabin.
The book's real center is the writing and reception of that novel, serialized beginning in June 1851 in the abolitionist paper The National Era and published as a book in March 1852, when it sold an unprecedented three hundred thousand copies within a year and turned a minister's wife into the most famous woman writer in America almost overnight. Wilson places the novel inside the reform culture of nineteenth century New England, the Beecher family's own deep involvement in religion and moral reform, and follows how a domestic novel about slavery reached readers who had never read an abolitionist pamphlet and never would, energizing the antislavery North while infuriating the South it depicted.
The biography does not stop with the novel's publication, following Stowe through the thirty or so books she wrote in all, travel writing, other novels, magazine work, and her work as a founding contributor to The Atlantic Monthly in 1857, into old age in Hartford, Connecticut, where she died in 1896 after years of declining memory that modern researchers now suspect was Alzheimer's disease. It suits a reader who wants the woman behind one of the most consequential American novels of the nineteenth century, situated fully inside her family, her faith, and the domestic losses that shaped what she chose to write about.
Historical Context & Significance
Crusader in Crinoline won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, arriving from a writer, Forrest Wilson, whose own career had ranged from newspaper reporting in Washington through wartime chemical warfare service to magazine correspondence from Paris for Vogue and McCall's. J.B. Lippincott published the biography in 1941, and Wilson died the following year, on May 9, 1942, five days after the Pulitzer announcement, at fifty nine.
The book arrived nearly nine decades after Uncle Tom's Cabin itself and helped keep Stowe's own biography in circulation even as the novel's reputation went through real swings, celebrated in its own century as a force that helped move public opinion against slavery, later criticized by some twentieth century readers for its treatment of Black characters, a debate the book predates but that later Stowe scholarship, including Joan Hedrick's 1994 biography, has engaged more directly.