Harriet’s first non-academic writing was in letters through which she attempted to express her feelings and beliefs clearly and movingly. Another vehicle for writing, slightly more public, was the unofficial school newspaper, which Harriet edited briefly when she was 14 and for which she wrote frequently. The paper’s subjects were mostly playful and humorous or satirical, giving her practice at the irony that would mark the best of her adult writing.
In 1832, Harriet’s father moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to head Lane Seminary. Harriet, Catharine, and four more of their siblings traveled with him and his wife by stagecoach. Harriet, just turned 21, would spend her next 18 years in Cincinnati. Within a short while of her arrival in Cincinnati, Harriet was invited to join a social and literary club (the “Semicolons”), an informal group whose members gathered to read aloud from each other’s contributions, mostly short, lighthearted, often satirical prose sketches and essays or verse. In this production of what her biographer Joan D. Hedrick calls “parlor literature,” Harriet continued to shape herself as a writer.
Among the other members of the “Semicolons” were a young biblical scholar and professor, Calvin Stowe, and his wife Eliza. Eliza and Harriet became close friends. But in August of 1834, while Harriet was visiting relatives in the East, Eliza Stowe died of cholera. Within eight months of his wife’s death, Calvin proposed to Harriet, and they were married in January of 1836. In September of that year, Harriet gave birth to twin girls, and sixteen months later to a baby boy. In all, she was to have seven children (and numerous miscarriages) between 1836 and 1850. Her second-to-last child, baby Charley, would die in 1849 at 18 months of cholera. Although hardly an unusual event for the time when infant mortality was still very high, Harriet and her husband suffered intense grief, and this loss would be reflected two years later in the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, both in the famous death scene of the saintly child Eva and in the author’s identification throughout the novel with parents whose children were taken forcibly from them by the terrible system of slavery.
By 1837, Harriet’s geography textbook had sold widely to schools, and she saw that writing could supplement her husband’s income. Beginning even before her marriage, Harriet published short fiction in popular magazines and church periodicals, and in 1843, Harper Brothers publishers brought out The Mayflower, a collection of her stories and sketches. She also wrote religious pamphlets and essays in literary criticism.
Less than a year after the death of her sixth child, pregnant with her seventh, Harriet left Cincinnati for Brunswick, Maine, where her husband had accepted a teaching post. She had written very little for five years and had never attempted a long work of fiction, but now she was about to begin the book that would make her famous and would influence antislavery sentiment not only in the United States but around the world as well.
