After 1878, Harriet virtually retired from writing except for letters. Her husband died in 1886, her daughter Georgiana the next year. Of her six children who had lived to adulthood, only her twin daughters, Hattie and Eliza, and her youngest child, called Charley like the dead infant, survived her. They were with her when she died in 1896 at 85.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was a writer from youth to old age, encouraged by her family and sustained by the conviction that she could accomplish social and moral good in this way, just as her father, husband, and brothers could by preaching and teaching. More than a century after her death, she is remembered almost solely for Uncle Tom's Cabin, the novel that forced white readers to identify and sympathize with the Africans and African Americans enslaved in the Southern United States. Today, it is difficult to realize the electrifying power of this book when it first appeared. It is easy to find fault with the overwhelming sentimentality of Little Eva's death scene, which affected nineteenth-century readers much differently than it does us; with the condescending characterization of some of the slaves; and especially with the sweet Christian passivity of Uncle Tom himself, whose behavior is the antithesis of what our own age finds admirable. Still, Uncle Tom's Cabin remains arguably the most important work of fiction ever published in the United States: a bold moral statement by a woman in a day when women were expected to be silent, and an unabashed portrait of American life in a day when American literature was still in the process of defining itself. Above all, it was a book that swayed its millions of readers into opposition to the monstrous institution of slavery, whose roots were buried in the earliest days of the nation and whose consequences extend into our own time.
