Once feted as the author of the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and among the best-paid writers of her day, Harriet Beecher Stowe fell into critical obscurity when literary modernists dismissed sentimental literature. More recently, Stowe's writings have been praised as leading exemplars of both sentimental and regional fiction, while Stowe herself has been designated a leading architect of what might be called "the New England myth." Her vision of Yankee village life, which rested on a beatific image of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and a Maine coast free of smoky factories and satanic mills, charmed a readership growing uneasily conscious of industrialization after the Civil War. Renewed attention to Stowe's regionalist interests has led to a new appreciation of this anxiety and of Stowe's significance for the Boston-based literary culture that dominated the later nineteenth century. Much of her capital, for the tastemaking group called the "Boston Brahmins...