The minister's wooing / Harriet Beecher Stowe ; edited with an introduction by Susan K. Harris and notes by Susan K. Harris and Danielle Conger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896.

Contributor:

Harris, Susan K., 1945-

Conger, Danielle.

Series:

Penguin classics

Language:

English

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xxix, 349 pages ; 20 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Penguin Books, 1999.

Summary:

First published in 1859, and set in eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, The Minister's Wooing is a historical novel and domestic comedy that satirizes Calvinism, celebrating its intellectual and moral integrity while critiquing its rigid theology. Mary Scudder lives with her widowed mother in a modest middle-class home. Dr. Hopkins, a Calvinist minister who boards with them, is dedicated to helping the slaves arriving at Newport and calls for the abolition of slavery. The pious Mary admires him but is also in love with the passionate but skeptical James Marvyn who, hungry for adventure, joins the crew of a ship setting sail for exotic destinations. When James is presumed lost at sea, Mary fears for his soul, and consents to marry the good Doctor. With important insights on slavery, history, and gender, as well as characters based on historical figures, The Minister's Wooing is, as Susan Harris notes in her Introduction, "an historical novel, like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie or A New England Tale; it is an attempt through fiction to create a moral, intellectual, and affective history for New England."

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages xxv-xxvii).

ISBN:

0140437029

OCLC:

40698698