by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Think not, when the wailing winds of autumn
Drive the shivering leaflets from the tree,—
Think not all is over: spring returneth,
Buds and leaves and blossoms thou shalt see. Continue reading Think Not All Is Over
These are the final chapters and the climax of the novel.
The Martyr
“Deem not the just by Heaven forgot!
Though life its common gifts deny,—
Though, with a crushed and bleeding heart,
And spurned of man, he goes to die!
For God hath marked each sorrowing day,
And numbered every bitter tear,
And heaven’s long years of bliss shall pay
For all his children suffer here.” BRYANT.[1] Continue reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Chapters 40, 41, 45
The following chapters show once again how precarious the lives of the enslaved could be. While Augustine St. Clare finds himself ready to take action in his own life against the evils of slavery under a Christian conviction nurtured by Eva and by Tom, events coincide to complicate Tom’s life once again. In Chapter 31 we are introduced to Simon Legree, Tom’s third and final human master. Of the three, two are portrayed as “humane” and the third as a brute, but Stowe shows that kind master or evil, an enslaved human is at the mercy of a system that defines him as chattel.
Chapters 15 and 16 introduce Tom’s new owners, a New Orleans family by the name of St. Clare. Augustine St. Clare and his wife Marie have an angelic daughter named Eva, and Augustine’s cousin Ophelia has come from her home in New England to manage the household due to Marie’s apparent incapacity. The chapters illustrate the various attitudes toward slavery among slave holders, and through Ophelia, Stowe draws the consciences of readers in her native New England into the fray.
Of Tom’s New Master, and Various Other Matters Continue reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Chapters 15, 16
Prior to Chapter 5, we are introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, farmers in Kentucky who own a fairly large estate and are presented as slaveholders who are kind to their enslaved workers. Eliza is the enslaved handmaid to Mrs. Shelby; she is light-skinned and is the mother of a young boy named Harry (her husband George Harris is enslaved on a neighboring farm). Chapter 4 introduces life in Uncle Tom’s cabin, where Tom, his wife Aunt Chloe, and their children live in the warmth of family and Christian devotion. We have also been introduced to Haley, a slave trader who has secured ownership of Shelby’s debt and is squeezing him to settle the account by selling some of his human property. The events in Chapter 5 illustrate how precarious the lives of “human property” can be even for those who live under “kind” masters.
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Showing the Feelings of Living Property on Changing Owners Continue reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Chapters 5, 7, 9, 12
This poem was inspired by something Stevens saw in Elizabeth Park. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, “Until quite lately a group of nuns came [to Elizabeth Park] each morning to paint water colors especially of the water lilies” (L 610). In this poem he imagines the nuns’ thoughts. As they paint, they ponder the miraculous beauty of life which seems to them “supernatural” in origin. This experience awakens in them a refreshing clarity of mind and spirit. They feel that this is a “special day” and that they themselves are an integral part of it. There were several French orders of nuns in the Hartford area, which explains all the French terms in the poem. Continue reading Nuns Painting Water-Lilies
Tracts of Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association, No. 2
Hartford, Conn.
The facsimile below is from Harvard Library. To navigate from page-to-page, mouse over the document below and click on the arrow buttons that appear at the bottom left-hand side of the page: 
The document can also be read on the Harvard Library viewer. Continue reading “A Mother’s Letters to a Daughter on Woman Suffrage” (1868)
Shifting from Clemens’s comical letters, speeches and short pieces to his classic, we get a sense of the depth he brought to his work. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was composed largely at Quarry Farm, Olivia Clemens’s sister Susan Crane’s farm in Elmira, New York. The family spent most of their summers there during the time they lived in Hartford, and Crane had built a study for her brother-in-law high on a hill overlooking the farm and the city. Continue reading from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
“The Mischievous Sinfulness of Mother Coakley,” a thoroughly reworked version of his New Yorker story “Mother Coakley’s Reform” (March 18, 1944), is an example of Gill’s exploration of the life of Catholic clergy in his fiction and is set in a monastery in a Carolina town. The narrative tone is warm and somewhat whimsical in telling the story of a nun struggling with sins of pride, envy, and greed stemming from, of all things, her competitiveness on the tennis court and a priest facing two specific weaknesses of his own. The hopefulness of faith and the capacity for change make this a meaningful pairing with “The Knife.” Continue reading The Mischievous Sinfulness of Mother Coakley
“The Knife,” originally published in The New Yorker (March 16, 1940), is described by John Updike as “a desolating sketch of faith’s clash with reality.” Themes familiar in Gill’s fiction and derived from personal experience motivate this story: namely, coping with the untimely death of a young mother and the role of Catholicism in that process. Continue reading The Knife