I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.

Attributed to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the remark expresses an author’s sense of moral and spiritual compulsion: the work is framed not as personal invention but as obedience to a higher authority. Read in the orbit of Stowe’s antislavery writing, it suggests that the story’s power and urgency come from a perceived divine mandate rather than literary ambition. The claim also functions rhetorically, deflecting praise from the author and reinforcing the text’s ethical seriousness—implying that to reject its message is to resist not merely a novelist but a transcendent moral law. More broadly, it reflects a 19th‑century Protestant idiom in which inspiration and “calling” could be invoked to validate reform literature.