Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811. A student at the Hartford Female Academy, founded by her sister Catherine, Stowe went on to teach there and at the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, also founded by her sister after their father, Lyman Beecher, became President of Lane Theological Seminary there. Stowe married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a professor at the Seminary, in 1836. They had seven children. He was on staff at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, from 1850 to 1853,and then at Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1853 to 1864. In Brunswick Harriet wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to oppose the Fugitive Slave Act, made in 1850 to criminalize offering help to an escaped slave. She penned thirty books in her lifetime, including Religious Poems (1867) and an attack on Lord Byron for alleged incestuous relations with his sister (1870). In the 1850s she travelled to England and met such women writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. On Calvin's retirement, they lived in Hartford, Connecticut, and Mandarin, Florida. She died in Hartford on July 1, 1896.

• Collected Poems of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Ed. John Michael Moran, Jr. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1967. PS 2951 M6 Robarts Library
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. 77 Forrest Street, Hartford, Conn.
• Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. PS 2956 .H43 1994 Robarts Library