Harriet Beecher Stowe

So you’re the little woman who started this big war, Abraham Lincoln is said to have quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin converted readers by the thousands to the anti-slavery movement and served notice that slavery’s days were numbered. Overnight Stowe became a celebrity, but to defenders of slavery she was the devil in petticoats.

Most writing about Stowe treats her as a literary figure and social reformer while underplaying her Christian faith. But Nancy Koester’s biography treats Stowe’s faith as central to her life — both her public fight against slavery and her own struggle through deep personal grief to find a gracious God.