Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life (Library of Religious Biography (LRB)) Paperback – January 13, 2014

*Starred Review* The subject of this accessible and absorbing interpretive biography was perhaps the most famous American woman of the nineteenth century and by far the most famous member of a family of distinguished—indeed, notorious—clergymen and Christian educators. Naturally enough, then, the lens through which Koester illuminates her subject is that of the Christian life. Harriet Beecher (who married another clergyman, Calvin Stowe) remained seriously committed to living out the Christianity all the Beechers embraced. That meant dedication to her spouse and children and also advancing the progressive Christian causes—women’s education and suffrage, abolition, black civil rights. Chafing to do her part after 18 years of motherhood, Stowe recruited female relatives to help her so she had the time to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the biggest American best-seller of the nineteenth century. It made her a celebrity overnight. She followed it with further novels, short stories, travel accounts (enabled by her fame), home-management advice books, and plenty of advocacy journalism. Meanwhile, she struggled mentally with the stringent Calvinism of her father—a development relieved somewhat by her understanding that living out Christianity, including utter trust in Jesus, was more important than theology. Koester engagingly and intelligently discusses each major novel, each family crisis, each journey, and each spiritual change, including a fluctuating interest in spiritualism after the deaths of two of her sons, without a whiff of academic fustiness. A top-notch read. --Ray Olson

-- James M. McPherson
Pulitzer Prize winner for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
"The daughter, sister, and wife of prominent clergymen and theologians, Harriet Beecher Stowe outshone them all in her impact on American religion and reform. Her life and work were framed by a spiritual quest that led from her ancestral Calvinism to high-church Episcopalianism and even spiritualism. Nancy Koester’s lucid narrative and penetrating analysis carry the reader along unfailingly on this fascinating quest."

-- Debby Applegate
Pulitzer Prize winner for The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
"It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was in her lifetime the most famous and influential woman in the United States, bar none. But she has been largely forgotten today. Nancy Koester’s comprehensive biography brings Stowe’s personal story to life for a new generation while re-creating the fierce religious and cultural battles that inspired her to write the Great American Novel that helped turn the course of American history."

-- Booklist (starred review)
"An accessible and absorbing interpretive biography. . . . Koester engagingly and intelligently discusses each major novel, each family crisis, each journey, and each spiritual change, including a fluctuating interest in spiritualism after the deaths of two of [Stowe’s] sons, without a whiff of academic fustiness. A top-notch read."

- - Christianity Today Feb 25, 2014, Harold Bush
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Spiritual Adventurer
Koester's biography should assume its rightful place as the best overall account of Stowe's spiritual interests and thought. Though written in part for serious scholars, ordinary readers should find it engaging as well. And that's a good thing: because, as many critics now agree, Stowe deserves recognition as one of the most influential spiritual writers in our nation's history.

- - Gospel Coalition Review, Nov. 20, 2013 Matthew J. Hall
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life
…Stowe emerges from Koester’s account as a profoundly human character. Though known as an author, Stowe is presented first and foremost as a woman of her time—as a wife and mother. In fact, one of the strengths of Koester’s biography is the way she explores the attention Stowe felt regarding her duties as a mother—and what she perceived to be a God-given calling to write. Even more, Stowe understood this calling to be for a specific purpose. It was her duty, she believed, to write in such a way that would effect a change in the moral conscience of Americans, most of whom she concluded were entirely apathetic to the moral scandal of slavery in America.