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“Uncle Tom’s Cabin�� was the 19th century’s bestselling book after the Bible, and it remains one of the most influential novels of all time, its impact on a par with that of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield�� and “Oliver Twist,�� progenitors of Britain’s child-labor laws, and George Orwell’s ��1984,�� with its searing portrait of totalitarianism. The powerful antislavery message of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin�� helped lay the moral groundwork that led to the Civil War.

Just how did a middle-aged New England faculty wife, mother and occasional magazine writer come to pen such an important piece of literature? In “A Plausible Man,�� Susanna Ashton, an expert on slave narratives and a professor of English at Clemson University, credits a chance encounter between Harriet Beecher Stowe and a fugitive slave in December 1850.

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