Publication
New York : Touchstone, c2008.
Collection
Call number
Fiction O
Physical description
304 p.; 25 cm
Status
Available
Call number
Description
A novelization based on a nineteenth-century sex scandal traces how the downfall of Henry Ward Beecher divided the nation and severed the loving relationship between his sisters, author Harriet Beecher Stowe and suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker.
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member CasualFriday
Harriet and Isabella is an absorbing historical novel about the Beecher family, whose most notable members were writer Harriet Beecher Stowe and clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. The author describes the Beechers as the Kennedy Clan of the 19th century: highly accomplished, close-knit, and the object
In the early 1870s, Henry Ward Beecher, known for theological views that seem close to Universalism, is accused of sexual impropriety with the wife of a close friend. The large Beecher family rally around him, except for sister Isabella, a suffragist in league with the scandalous Victoria Woodhull. Isabella has the odd idea that truth trumps loyalty, and she believes her brother guilty of the charges against him. Most of the family shuns her, including Harriet.
I enjoyed the period detail in the book, and I was struck by how much things haven't changed in terms of "liberal" attitudes toward feminism. Equally striking, though, was the author's handling of family dynamics. Anyone who has ever been the family oddball will relate to this book.
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of intense (and gleeful) public attention when they fall. In the early 1870s, Henry Ward Beecher, known for theological views that seem close to Universalism, is accused of sexual impropriety with the wife of a close friend. The large Beecher family rally around him, except for sister Isabella, a suffragist in league with the scandalous Victoria Woodhull. Isabella has the odd idea that truth trumps loyalty, and she believes her brother guilty of the charges against him. Most of the family shuns her, including Harriet.
I enjoyed the period detail in the book, and I was struck by how much things haven't changed in terms of "liberal" attitudes toward feminism. Equally striking, though, was the author's handling of family dynamics. Anyone who has ever been the family oddball will relate to this book.
Show Less
LibraryThing member debs4jc
The Harriet is Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Isabella is her sister Isabella Beecher. The novel revolves around a breach that occured between the two sisters when their brother (a prominent minister) became involved in a scandel where he was accused of adultery. The two sisters took slightly
This historical novel was a great blend of an emotionally laden storyline and historical information. This worked well to keep my interest. Fans of historical fiction, especially that dealing with the issues of slavery and/or womans suffarage and women's rights will love this one.
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different stands on what their brother should do and that drove them apart. At the beginning of the story that brother is dying and Isabella wants desperately to see him before he passes and hopefully find reconciliation with the family. But they refuse to let her in the house. The story flashes back and forth between her continued efforts to reconcile with the Beechers and flashbacks to what happened in the past. Along the way the reader learns a lot about this once prominent family and the issues of their day--slavery and women's rights.This historical novel was a great blend of an emotionally laden storyline and historical information. This worked well to keep my interest. Fans of historical fiction, especially that dealing with the issues of slavery and/or womans suffarage and women's rights will love this one.
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LibraryThing member marieburton2004
absolutely loved this novel. My heart ached at several points within the book and then again at the end. I even cried. I checked the rating on Goodreads as I marked this finished, and the average rating is 3.24 of 5. So again, I am loving a book beyond reality. But I'm not changing my rating of
Patricia O'Brien walked the paths of the main protagonists in Brooklyn Heights and read the archives of the Brooklyn Library to get the essence of her story just right. She conveyed the sense of of the period with ease, and focused on the story of two of the Beecher sisters, Harriet and Isabella. The story is wrapped with questions of virtue, humility, wisdom, and the price that was paid by Beechers for all of it. And at times, it was Harriet versus Isabella, and triumph versus burden.
The novel opens up to Henry's death bed, and swiftly jumps to the earlier times of Harriet and Isabella's childhood and growing up as members of the prominent Beecher family. There are a few themes here, but the main theme stealthily ponders the justification of standing up for your rights, as a woman, as a member of the community, as a wife, and as a sister. Harriet stands by her brother in all ways, and in doing so has knowingly alienated her sister Isabella who she was once so close to.
The narrative is a third person omniscient, switching from Isabella's thoughts to Harriet's about halfway through the book which made me miss Isabella as I had grown attached to her. Harriet was a bit too haughty to really connect to until later on as we feel her thoughts and begin to empathize with her. Yet certain small things we would be fed, such as her humiliation of a book that was not as successful as her previous one, when she wrote about Lord Byron’s incestuous relations with his half-sister in Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) and The History of the Byron Controversy (1871), small insights that would begin to play on our sympathies for Harriet. The younger sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker also became an important woman in those times, like her sister, trying to fight the system as she spoke up for the right of women to vote, although she is always portrayed as more of a simple-stick-to-the-facts kind of person in the novel. She had associated with names we recognize from the time such as Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Victoria Woodhull was the one who broke the story on the scandal of Henry's adultery, and the family warned Isabella to stop seeing Victoria. As a result, Isabella became the black sheep of the family, but also because she wanted her brother to simply admit to the mistake of adultery and move on. But the entire family believed Henry was innocent, thus Isabella was treated harshly for her views.
The author shifts between their current time at Henry's death bed and then to early events that they recalled back from their memories and then back to the trial that was sensationalized because of who they were. The results of being a celebrity is another theme here, as one wonders if Henry wasn't a Beecher, would there have been such news about the trial.. would there have been a trial in the first place? The trial doesn't occur until halfway through the book, so the author does a good job of building up the characters and making us comfortable with our opinions of them before we try and discern fact from fiction as the trial occurs. We do not know if Henry is guilty of cheating on his wife, Eunice, who is such a cold person that nobody wonders why Henry would stray, but as a reader we are not privy to the answer to that all important question of innocence or guilt. That being the case, this becomes a tender tale of how a very close knit family copes with scandal in the midst of the harsh public spotlight, and the author treats it with a lot of drama, a little mystery and a lot of heart. The events that keep switching from 1875 to earlier days also makes the mystery fester as the story builds up to the conclusion of the trial.
I found the writing to be fluent and the nuance of the times she conveyed to be educational, with the issues of slavery and the suffrage movement. As a historical junkie myself, I would have preferred some more history in general but I still relished each page as the story unfolded. The switching to different periods got a little confusing when I was picking up the book again after 24 hours and I had to get my bearings as to which stage we were in. It was presented in a unique way that turned this mini history lesson into something meant to be savored. At 298 pages, this seems small in relation to the amount of historical facts the author could have barraged us with, instead she blends an intricate story of betrayal, family, love, loneliness, honesty with a little history into a compelling novel that I highly recommend.
After the 298 pages of text, the book includes a Reading Guide, Author's note and interview, and a suggested further reading list, which I intend to research for my own personal library; always a good sign that the author Patricia O'Brien did a good job of selling me the story of Harriet and Isabella. There is so much more to be learned about this great family of our American history, and the author has simply whetted my appetite. I felt deprived when the story did end, however, as I had fallen in love with the characters and did not want the story to end. I then found that the author has also written another historical fiction novel, The Glory Cloak, which focuses on Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton. SOLD! Louisa May Alcott is always my favorite author from childhood; my first book beyond Judy Blume that I had read as an impressionable ten year old was Little Women, and my loyalty has never strayed. I enjoyed O'Brien's prose so much I hope that The Glory Cloak is similar in style.
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4.5, because I LOVED IT! This is a very absorbing fictional account of the sisters to Henry Ward Beecher who caused a sensational scandal in 1875 when he was publicly accused of being a cheating preacher. These two sisters were Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Isabella Hooker, who was a leader in the woman's suffrage movement and also became an author. Henry shocked his family and friends with the scandal of their times that tore the family apart, as he was the most eloquent and popular preacher of the time. This was not your ordinary family; the Beecher's were an intellectual group and there were a total thirteen siblings that called Lyman Beecher their father. Lyman Beecher was a force all by himself, and he instilled family pride and the desire for learning, along with political stands on abolition, into the family value structure. How the Beecher children took this knowledge to greater heights helped America to grow in the 1850's and beyond, such as with Harriet's book, which was a small factor in providing inspiration for the American Civil War. Patricia O'Brien walked the paths of the main protagonists in Brooklyn Heights and read the archives of the Brooklyn Library to get the essence of her story just right. She conveyed the sense of of the period with ease, and focused on the story of two of the Beecher sisters, Harriet and Isabella. The story is wrapped with questions of virtue, humility, wisdom, and the price that was paid by Beechers for all of it. And at times, it was Harriet versus Isabella, and triumph versus burden.
The novel opens up to Henry's death bed, and swiftly jumps to the earlier times of Harriet and Isabella's childhood and growing up as members of the prominent Beecher family. There are a few themes here, but the main theme stealthily ponders the justification of standing up for your rights, as a woman, as a member of the community, as a wife, and as a sister. Harriet stands by her brother in all ways, and in doing so has knowingly alienated her sister Isabella who she was once so close to.
The narrative is a third person omniscient, switching from Isabella's thoughts to Harriet's about halfway through the book which made me miss Isabella as I had grown attached to her. Harriet was a bit too haughty to really connect to until later on as we feel her thoughts and begin to empathize with her. Yet certain small things we would be fed, such as her humiliation of a book that was not as successful as her previous one, when she wrote about Lord Byron’s incestuous relations with his half-sister in Lady Byron Vindicated (1870) and The History of the Byron Controversy (1871), small insights that would begin to play on our sympathies for Harriet. The younger sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker also became an important woman in those times, like her sister, trying to fight the system as she spoke up for the right of women to vote, although she is always portrayed as more of a simple-stick-to-the-facts kind of person in the novel. She had associated with names we recognize from the time such as Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Victoria Woodhull was the one who broke the story on the scandal of Henry's adultery, and the family warned Isabella to stop seeing Victoria. As a result, Isabella became the black sheep of the family, but also because she wanted her brother to simply admit to the mistake of adultery and move on. But the entire family believed Henry was innocent, thus Isabella was treated harshly for her views.
The author shifts between their current time at Henry's death bed and then to early events that they recalled back from their memories and then back to the trial that was sensationalized because of who they were. The results of being a celebrity is another theme here, as one wonders if Henry wasn't a Beecher, would there have been such news about the trial.. would there have been a trial in the first place? The trial doesn't occur until halfway through the book, so the author does a good job of building up the characters and making us comfortable with our opinions of them before we try and discern fact from fiction as the trial occurs. We do not know if Henry is guilty of cheating on his wife, Eunice, who is such a cold person that nobody wonders why Henry would stray, but as a reader we are not privy to the answer to that all important question of innocence or guilt. That being the case, this becomes a tender tale of how a very close knit family copes with scandal in the midst of the harsh public spotlight, and the author treats it with a lot of drama, a little mystery and a lot of heart. The events that keep switching from 1875 to earlier days also makes the mystery fester as the story builds up to the conclusion of the trial.
I found the writing to be fluent and the nuance of the times she conveyed to be educational, with the issues of slavery and the suffrage movement. As a historical junkie myself, I would have preferred some more history in general but I still relished each page as the story unfolded. The switching to different periods got a little confusing when I was picking up the book again after 24 hours and I had to get my bearings as to which stage we were in. It was presented in a unique way that turned this mini history lesson into something meant to be savored. At 298 pages, this seems small in relation to the amount of historical facts the author could have barraged us with, instead she blends an intricate story of betrayal, family, love, loneliness, honesty with a little history into a compelling novel that I highly recommend.
After the 298 pages of text, the book includes a Reading Guide, Author's note and interview, and a suggested further reading list, which I intend to research for my own personal library; always a good sign that the author Patricia O'Brien did a good job of selling me the story of Harriet and Isabella. There is so much more to be learned about this great family of our American history, and the author has simply whetted my appetite. I felt deprived when the story did end, however, as I had fallen in love with the characters and did not want the story to end. I then found that the author has also written another historical fiction novel, The Glory Cloak, which focuses on Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton. SOLD! Louisa May Alcott is always my favorite author from childhood; my first book beyond Judy Blume that I had read as an impressionable ten year old was Little Women, and my loyalty has never strayed. I enjoyed O'Brien's prose so much I hope that The Glory Cloak is similar in style.
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LibraryThing member mcplinfo
Jacket Notes:
From "New York Times" bestselling author O'Brien comes an intelligent and deeply sensitive historical novel about the famous Beecher family and the sex scandal that nearly severed the loving bond between two sisters, even as it galvanized a nation.
From "New York Times" bestselling author O'Brien comes an intelligent and deeply sensitive historical novel about the famous Beecher family and the sex scandal that nearly severed the loving bond between two sisters, even as it galvanized a nation.
LibraryThing member Kasthu
Harriet and Isabella is a novel about the relationship between Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker. Set in 1870s and ‘80s Brooklyn, the story alternates between Henry Ward Beecher’s deathbed and the time when he was involved in a scandalous adultery case, in which he
In the back of the book, the author says that she went to Brooklyn and interviewed present-day members of Plymouth Church, to see what they thought of the Beecher scandal. While some members of the congregation thought that Beecher never had an affair, I’m with O’Brien in terms of wondering what really happened. And the author does a fine job in this novel of presenting both sides of the scandal. Isabella’s point of view is the focus of this novel, but it’s equally about Harriet and her struggle, both personally and professionally.
The author spent a long time wandering the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights; as a former resident of the neighborhood, I was very pleased by the fact that everything in terms of geography was described in minute detail. Since I know the neighborhood so well, I could just see in my mind’s eye the conversations that took place in this book on the lawn in front of Plymouth Church, or the tea shop on the corner of Montague and Hicks.
I wasn’t crazy about the inconsistency in terms of past/ present tense. And there are an awful lot of flashbacks. But altogether, I enjoyed this wonderful book about the power of forgiveness.
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was accused of grossly immoral conduct and practicing free love. Harriet, the abolitionist, supported her brother, while Isabella, the suffragist, took the side of his accuser, Victoria Woodhull. As Beecher lies dying, Isabella comes back to Brooklyn to see if she can mend old wounds.In the back of the book, the author says that she went to Brooklyn and interviewed present-day members of Plymouth Church, to see what they thought of the Beecher scandal. While some members of the congregation thought that Beecher never had an affair, I’m with O’Brien in terms of wondering what really happened. And the author does a fine job in this novel of presenting both sides of the scandal. Isabella’s point of view is the focus of this novel, but it’s equally about Harriet and her struggle, both personally and professionally.
The author spent a long time wandering the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights; as a former resident of the neighborhood, I was very pleased by the fact that everything in terms of geography was described in minute detail. Since I know the neighborhood so well, I could just see in my mind’s eye the conversations that took place in this book on the lawn in front of Plymouth Church, or the tea shop on the corner of Montague and Hicks.
I wasn’t crazy about the inconsistency in terms of past/ present tense. And there are an awful lot of flashbacks. But altogether, I enjoyed this wonderful book about the power of forgiveness.
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LibraryThing member sadiekaycarver
This book is heart-achingly good. You find yourself grieving for this dysfunctional famous family. Showing a glimpse of how hard the women in the sufferage movement had it, reminds me as a woman how good we do have it. The struggles within the family show how little has changed within family
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dynamics throughout the ages. I enjoyed this book, but feel like it seemed if you had background knowledge of this family, you would like this book more. Show Less
LibraryThing member E.J
I tried to like this book more than I actually did. O'Brien writes about the Beecher family, solid characters for a book, but I didn't feel they were very well developed. Let me rephrase that. There were definite qualities about the characters, but none that made them very likeable or made me
The first half is Isabella's point of view. I found her sufferage work fascinating, but not exactly her character. The second half is Harriet (author of Uncle Tom's cabin) and her view of their brother's trial. I think maybe I expected too much because I've always liked Harriet Beecher Stowe and she comes across as more self - absorbed and haughty than I ever would have anticipated.
All in all the book had some interesting material, and I would like to read more about the events and people in a more factual manner.
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invest much in their story. The first half is Isabella's point of view. I found her sufferage work fascinating, but not exactly her character. The second half is Harriet (author of Uncle Tom's cabin) and her view of their brother's trial. I think maybe I expected too much because I've always liked Harriet Beecher Stowe and she comes across as more self - absorbed and haughty than I ever would have anticipated.
All in all the book had some interesting material, and I would like to read more about the events and people in a more factual manner.
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LibraryThing member MichelleCH
I was expecting so much more when I started this book, the characters were shallow and I really didn't care about them at all. The leaps in time became annoying and the depiction of the sisters felt unrealistic - what 85 year-old runs to climb a new bridge? Nothing interesting develops out of the
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initial build-up..all I can say is thank goodness it is over. Show Less
LibraryThing member julie10reads
Novel about the turbulent, often destructive, relationships between the assertive Beecher siblings as they pursue various causes: suffragism, abolitionism, education, temperance, women's rights and religion. Henry Ward Beecher was considered the most famous preacher in America. His sister, Harriet
Ms O'Brien sketches enough history to inform the context without bogging down the narrative. More than once I felt like shaking Harriet Beecher Stowe for her cruelty to younger sister, Isabella and for her uncritical trust in her charismatic brother, Henry.
8 out of 10 Recommended to readers who enjoy 19th century American history and feminist literature.
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Beecher Stowe was one of the most famous and influential novelists of the 19th century United States. A highly political family, the Beechers were the Kennedys of their time, always fodder for news. When Henry Ward Beecher is charged with adultery, the trial stretches on for six months. In the end a mistrial is called. The Beechers huddle to protect Henry, all but Isabella who has been excommunicated for urging Henry to confess. Author Patricia O'Brien convincingly portrays the high key dynamics among the opinionated members of the Beecher clan and yet she manages to keep the reader feeling sympathetic to the family in general. For the Beechers, loyalty trumps truth. Henry is obviously the leader of the family and to doubt his word would be unthinkable to the rest. Not to mention that this doubt would undermine his siblings' credibility in the eyes of the world.Ms O'Brien sketches enough history to inform the context without bogging down the narrative. More than once I felt like shaking Harriet Beecher Stowe for her cruelty to younger sister, Isabella and for her uncritical trust in her charismatic brother, Henry.
8 out of 10 Recommended to readers who enjoy 19th century American history and feminist literature.
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Language
ISBN
9781416552208