The Minister's Wooing

Harriet Beecher Stowe's forgotten masterpiece is a comic gem hiding in plain sight. Set in 18th-century Newport, Rhode Island, a town where church bells ring for Sunday service and slave ships dock in the same harbor, Stowe weaves a sparkling romance betweenMary Scudder, her widowed mother, and the family's famous boarder: Samuel Hopkins, a real-life Calvinist theologian who preaches against slavery while living under the same roof with the woman he hopes to marry. When Mary's true love, the handsome skeptic James Marvyn, is lost at sea, mother and daughter face an impossible choice. The result is a novel that crackles with witty dialogue, sharp social observation, and the quiet terror of predestination. Stowe, who lost two children and watched her sister mourn a drowned fiancé, turns her personal grief into a devastating critique of Calvinist doctrine, all wrapped in the irresistible package of a romantic comedy. This is Stowe unbound from Uncle Tom's Cabin, writing with the freedom of someone who knows the machinery of sentimental fiction and loves to subvert it.