Sarah's review of The Minister's Wooing
The Minister's Wooing (Penguin Classics) by Harriet Beecher Stowe
** 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 ...more
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 ...more
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