Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut. She was the seventh child of preacher Lyman Beecher and his first wife, Roxana Foote, who died when Stowe was four years old. Her father soon remarried, and Stowe had a good relationship with her stepmother, Harriet Porter Beecher. When Stowe became depressed after her mother's death she spent time with her grandmother and aunt. She soon became a good student at a girls' school and moved on to Litchfield Academy at age ten. At twelve, she won first prize for her essay "Can the Immortality of the Soul Be Proved by the Light of Nature?"

In 1824, Stowe's older sister Catherine, with whom she was very close, started a school for teenaged girls in Hartford, Connecticut. Stowe was one of her first pupils. She began writing poetry, but her sister dismissed that activity and...