HARRIET BEECHER STOWE: WOMAN AND ARTIST, by Edward M. Holmes, Northern Lights, 157 pages, $12.95.

Edward Holmes deserves more acclaim than he has received. His short stories have graced the pages of numerous literary publications; his “Faulkner’s Twice-told Tales” is a necessity for any serious study of the works of William Faulkner; and his fiction includes “Driftwood,” “A Part of the Main” and “Mostly Maine”; one hopes that “Harriet Beecher Stowe” will be recognized — not only by the reading public in general, but also by critics — as the gem that it is.

The foreword, by Josephine Donovan, thickly peppered with (for the most part) unnecessary quotation marks, refers condescendingly to “common readers”; contains ambiguities, and lacks a clear active voice. Once the reader, common or otherwise, gets past Donovan’s remarks, he quickly realizes that this is no common book.

The large, clear print is a pleasure in itself; easy on the tired eyes. Holmes, University of Maine professor emeritus, provides a concise history of colonial America as it was lived in Salem Village, Mass., and proceeds to contrast the outlets for creativity as they existed at that time for men and women.

Writes Holmes, “Men discovered outlets for creative impulse in numerous ways. Jonathan Edwards found expression in theology and in sermons; Jefferson, in politics, architecture, and gadgets; Washington, in war as well as in statesmanship; Franklin, in nearly everything he could see or touch.

“Others built ships, designed them, or sailed them; still more turned their energies to a craft or to trade. Women had the home. Precisely, just as they had had it a half-century, or a century before, and the home, every bit as much as the rest of life, if not more than it, lived under the spell (the word is chosen advisedly, for not every age has the privilege of so thorough a conviction) —

the spell of a Calvinist world view, which was also an after-world view. … Thus thoroughly and unwittingly did history prepare a society of novel readers … who would demand and absorb, in almost unlimited quantities, domestic themes. … All the subsequent ranting and preaching against novels, the attempt to suppress them in the home, like much of the raging against comic books … later, served only to provide free publicity, to sweeten the stolen grapes.”

Holmes describes the difference between writers of the sentimental and the romantic thus: “… sentimental novelists, for example, looked upon everyone as of good and benevolent instincts; the romantics held man originally good but corrupted by society … sentimental novelists are divorced from any realities concerning the individual’s inner life, behavior, and society; the romantics are not. Yet no utterly sharp division exists. Some writers, parts even of the works of some writers, will rest on one side or the other of an uncertain shadow llne.”

We are shown how Harriet Beecher Stowe, although utilizing methods of both the sentimentalists and the romanticists, was too fine a writer to restrict herself to these popular themes. Holmes tells us ” … in Boston a leading publisher rejected a novel authored by a little-known short-story writer, the wife of a Bowdoin College professor at Brunswick, Maine, one of the heaviest rejection mistakes, in a financial sense, ever made. The editor feared that publishing `Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ might injure his firm’s trade with the South.”

Having set the stage so beautifully, Holmes goes on to introduce us to a young and very human Harriet. His fondness for the writer is evident; so too is his awareness of the flaws in her work. Of her predilection for allowing her characters to lecture: “They are very proper lectures, but their only effect on the art of fiction is to help spoil it.” (Reading many of Stowe’s lecture-sermons, often in the form of letters, this reviewer is reminded of the present popular wrlter Anne Rice.)

He points out Stowe’s reluctance to write scenes of sexual passion and states: “If she could not do them well, we should thank her for not trying. There are worse things in an artist than restraint.” He somewhat indulgently accuses Stowe of using sentimental devlces but denies that she was a sentimentalist: “… she was much more besides, and the impressive fact about her may be that she was able to rise above the contemporary cloud as far as she did.”

Regarding realism, Holmes credits Stowe for the way she captured speech patterns, but “she was no better able to deal with scenes of violence, however, than she was with scenes of sexual passion, and the times might not have permitted her to do so if she could.”

He makes a wry comment on modern New England: “Her depiction of a village situation here is by no means completely dated in all New England towns even today, despite the crystallizing of soclety lnto lower-uppers, upper-middles, lower-lowers, and such. … Maine coastal towns are, and were, old communities as such things go in North America; there is within them a highly delicate balance of friendships and feuds, of irritations and tolerances, and an almost daily, and only partly conscious, casting up of accounts, adjustment, and minute compensation. Such towns are as subtly and finely stratified into social levels as any Yankee city. Probably they were the same in the 19th century. Chance scarcely touched them until the advent of electricity and the internal combustion engine about the time of World War I, and for 20 years after they showed considerable resistance to innovation. A writer can pick and choose, even in such small places, and find whatever kind of thing he or she wants to look for.”

The influences of realism, Puritanism, romanticism and sentimentalism as they appear in Stowe’s work are thoroughly and clearly explored and explained; “Harriet Beecher Stowe” is an excellent reference work, not only for the Stowe scholar but for anyone interested in good writing.

The season also marks the publication of “The Nightshade, Short Story Reader,” edited by Ted Holmes and illustrated by Carolyn Page (Nightshade Press, 156 pages, $9.95). Although the short stories in “The Nightshade” are uneven, ranging in quality from quite good to rather amateurish, the book contains an excellent preface by Holmes, in which he writes wonderfully of the differences between the novel and the short story.

Lois M. Reed is a free-lance writer who resides in Carmel.