Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home presents comparative domestic biographies of four American Realist writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Drawing upon extensive primary sources to reconstruct the authors’ private lives, Domestic Biographies illuminates how they lived when no one was looking. In particular this book examines how the authors worked and wrote at home and how their home life in turn made its way into their novels and non-fiction. Domestic Biographies offers an innovative and exciting architectural and domestic lens through which to study the lives and literature of America’s best-known Realists.

Elif S. Armbruster, Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University, received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University.

Every year sees the republication of Stowe’s first and most famous novel.  This edition, however, is unique: in addition to reprinting all of the prefaces that Stowe wrote for authorized European republications of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this Broadview edition gathers a remarkably diverse range of primary materials that shed light on the development and unprecedented reception of Stowe’s controversial text.  The volume’s appendices include the original illustrations that accompanied the first American edition of the novel; abolitionist, colonizationist, and proslavery views on slavery; letters that Stowe wrote before and just after the publication of her novel; the full text of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; American responses to the novel (including those of abolitionist, African American, proslavery, and Southern readers); European reviews (including three previously untranslated foreign language reviews); and a gallery of visual images that recapture how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was reproduced both on stage and in film.  With an introduction that preserves the dramatic suspense of Stowe’s text and over 400 footnotes that clarify biblical and other cultural allusions, this is an edition designed for academic and general readers alike.

Christopher G. Diller is an associate professor in the department of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.

One of the first celebrity authors, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) became famous almost overnight when Uncle Tom’s Cabin—which sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year of publication—appeared in 1852. Known by virtually all famous writers in the United States and many in England and regarded by many women writers as a role model because of her influence in the literary marketplace, Stowe herself was the subject of many books, articles, essays, and poems during her lifetime.
This volume brings together for the first time a range of primary materials about Stowe’s private and public life written by family members, friends, and fellow writers who knew or were influenced by her before and after Uncle Tom’s Cabin catapulted her to fame. Included are periodical articles by Fanny Fern and Charles Dudley Warner; biographical essays by Sarah Josepha Hale and Rose Terry Cooke; letters by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Harriet Jacobs; recollections by Frederick Douglass, Annie Adams Fields, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Charles Beecher; and poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and John Greenleaf Whittier. An introduction at the beginning of each essay connects it to its historical and cultural context, explanatory notes provide information about people and places, and the book includes a detailed introduction, over fifty illustrations, a bibliography, and a chronology of Stowe’s life.
The thirty-eight recollections gathered in Stowe in Her Own Time form a biographical narrative designed to provide several perspectives on the famous author, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in agreement but always perceptive. The figure who emerges from this analytical collection is far more complex than the image she helped construct in her lifetime.

Susan Belasco is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She has authored, coauthored, edited, and coedited numerous books and articles on American literature, including Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays, The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, and Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America