The Minister's Wooing

Harriet Beecher Stowe — 1999

From the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a domestic comedy that examines slavery, Protestant theology, and gender differences in early America. First published in 1859, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s third novel is set in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, a community known for its engagement in both religious piety and the slave trade. Mary Scudder lives in a modest farmhouse with her widowed mother an their boarder, Samuel Hopkins, a famous Calvinist theologian who preaches against slavery. Mary is in love with the passionate James Marvyn, but Mary is devout and James is a skeptic, and Mary’s mother opposes the union. James goes to sea, and when he is reportedly drowned, Mary is persuaded to become engaged to Dr. Hopkins. With colorful characters, including many based on real figures, and a plot that hinges on romance, The Minister’s Wooing combines comedy with regional history to show the convergence of daily life, slavery, and religion in post-Revolutionary New England. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Reviews

Sarah Sammis@pussreboots

Apr 4, 2024

** spoiler alert ** Although I had learned about Harriet Beecher Stowe's most famous book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in high school, the first book I read was The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862): a delightful novel set in a fishing village in Maine. It's also vastly different from her most famous novel. Last February when I had $100 to spend at Powell's, I made a bee-line to for Stowe's novels and found a lovely 1883 edition of The Minister's Wooing (1859). The Minister's Wooing is a mixture of the political evangelizing of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the sentimental romance of The Pearl of Orr's Island. The Wikipedia article compares Stowe's novel to The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850) but the similarities are superficial at best. Hawthorne's historical fiction set in the 1600s exposes the inhumane consequences of theocracy. While Mary, the heroine of The Minister's Wooing is raised as a devout Christian, she never has the opportunity to sin. Mary Scudder is about as Mary Sue a character as one can get in a book. Since Mary Scudder is really secondary to the plot even though her adult life is being plotted by everyone else in the novel, Stowe pads out the novel with a number of treatises ranging from thoughts on Calvinism, slavery, abolitionism, faith, family, marriage, and gender equality. These lengthy asides are fairly common in novels of the time; think of the many chapters on whaling in Moby Dick (1851). The Minister's Wooing was first serialized in Atlantic Monthly from December 1858 to December 1859. The Cornell library has the magazine version available online.