All That Makes Life Bright

July 10, 2017
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) wrote more than 30 books, including the influential and perennially bestselling abolitionist work Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and also bore seven children. She and Calvin Stowe were married for 50 years. Kilpack, inaugurating a romance series about the lives of famous women writers, looks at the early years of their marriage, when they had three children in two years and Harriet was barely established as a writer. The expectations for a woman in that day and age did not include serious intellectual work, and in Kilpack’s telling, both Harriet and Calvin must learn to take her career seriously in order to make their marriage work. Kilpack’s depiction of the challenges of juggling household management, childcare, and pen is convincing and touching, and her research is solid (and well-explained in the endnotes), but her prose is rather flat, side characters are standard types, and there is a tendency to repeat information. That said, as an examination of how much labor domesticity really involves, the book is surprisingly passionate—and entertaining.

Starred review from August 1, 2017
Am I doing the right thing? Harriet Beecher knows that marrying Calvin Stowe means gambling with her future. Many, if not most, husbands expect their wives to dedicate their lives to maintaining a suitable home and raising a family. But Harriet truly believes Calvin is a different kind of man, someone who will support her as she strives to become a writer. As the new couple settles into married life, however, Harriet discovers that balancing her roles as both wife and writer isn't quite as easy as she expected. In her latest marvelously engaging historical novel, Kilpack (The Vicar's Daughter, 2017) writes with great insight and superb sensitivity about the ways in which Harriet and Calvin struggle to achieve a marriage that works for both of them. At the same time, Kilpack deftly demonstrates how Harriet's early married years acted as a sort of literary petri dish in which she refined her own writing skills while also defining her thoughts on the issue of slavery, ultimately leading her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel which played a major role in advancing the abolitionist cause not just in the United States but around the world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)