Despite the racy title, McFarland (Hawthorne in Concord
) has not penned a salacious tell-all about Harriet Beecher Stowe's romantic life, but rather a fairly unremarkable biography of Stowe and the whole Beecher family. Though ostensibly organized around the three men important to Harriet—her father, her brother and her husband—the device is really just a gimmick that leads to confusing departures from chronology, as when McFarland summarizes the childhood of Harriet's father halfway through the book. The most perceptive sections deal with Stowe's literary career. McFarland argues that Poganuc People
is her most “coherent” work, and that Uncle Tom's Cabin
, the abolitionist novel that made Stowe an international star, was born in part out of her experience as a mother: when her young son died, Stowe was sensitized to the plight of slave mothers separated from their children. This narrative is sure to be overshadowed by Debby Applegate's Pulitzer Prize–winning study of Stowe's brother, The Most Famous Man in America
(2006); Joan Hedrick's Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
(1994), to which McFarland acknowledges his debt, will remain definitive. (Nov. 10)
