The Minister's Wooing is a "sentimental romance" (Discovering Authors 3.0) by Harriet Beecher Stowe based on her older sister Catherine's life and "a study of the paradoxes and ironies inherent in Calvinism, a religion [of which her father Lyman Beecher was a well-known minister and] Stowe later abandoned when she converted to Episcopalianism" (D.A. 3.0).

Catherine, Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister, had contributed to a period of mental instability for Stowe by being a very strict caretaker (Adams 21). (In fact, Stowe's first work, a geography textbook, was published as if written by "Catherine E. Beecher" without Harriet gettting any credit (Jackson 156–158).)

Resources

• “Harriet (Elizabeth) Beecher Stowe.” Discovering Authors 3.0. Gale Group, 1999
• Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1963.
• Jackson, Phyllis Wynn. Victorian Cinderella: The Story of Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Company, 1947.