Until fairly recently Harriet Beecher Stowe has been remembered almost exclusively for Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). For almost a half century, however, she not only wrote some of the finest regional novels in American literature but was also a steady contributor of short stories to widely circulated family publications, annual gift books, and influential magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly. For the past three decades, a steady stream of scholarship and criticism has provided a much more balanced view of her literary accomplishments, and today her fiction has assumed a significant place in nineteenth-century American literature.

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Harriet Elizabeth Beecher was the daughter of the wellknown Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and his first wife, Roxana Foote Beecher. Among her seven brothers and sisters were Catharine Beecher, an older sister who is notable for her theories of women's education and health (theories which receive prominent treatment in...