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For half a century Lydia Maria Child was a household name in the United States. Hardly a sphere of nineteenth-century life can be found in which Lydia Maria Child did not figure prominently as a pathbreaker. Although best known today for having edited Harriet A. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she pioneered almost every department of nineteenth-century American letters-the historical novel, the short story, children’s literature, the domestic advice book, women’s history, antislavery fiction, journalism, and the literature of aging. Offering a panoramic view of a nation and culture in flux, this innovative cultural biography (originally published by Duke University Press in 1994) recreates the world as well as the life of a major nineteenth-figure whose career as a writer and social reformer encompassed issues central to American history.
List of contents
Illustrations ix
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
Chronology xix
Abbreviations xxvi
Prologue: A Passion for Books 1
1. The Author of
Hobomok 16
2.
Rebels and "Rivals": Self Portraits of a Conflicted Young Artist 38
3.
The Juvenile Miscellany: The Creation of an American Children's Literature 57
4. A Marriage of True Minds: Espousing the Indian Cause 80
5. Blighted Prospects: Indian Fiction and Domestic Reality 101
6.
The Frugal Housewife: Financial Worries and Domestic Advice 126
7. Children's Literature and Antislavery: Conservative Medium, Radical Message 151
8. "The First Woman in the Republic": An Antislavery Baptism 173
9. An Antislavery Marriage: Careers at Cross Purposes 195
10.
The Conditions of Women: Double Binds, Unresolved Conflicts 214
11. Schisms, Personal and Political 249
12.
The National Anti-Slavery Standard: Family Newspaper or Factional Organ? 267
13.
Letters from New York: The Invention of a New Literary Genre 295
14. Sexuality and Marriage in
Fact and Fiction 320
15.
The Progress of Religious Ideas: A "Pilgrimage of Pennance" 356
16.
Autumnal Leaves: Reconsecrated Partnerships, Personal and Political 384
17. The Example of John Brown 416
18. Child's Civil War 443
19. Visions of a Reconstructed America:
The Freedmen's Book and
A Romance of the Republic 487
20. A Radical Old Age 532
21.
Aspirations of the World 573
Afterword 608
Notes 617
Works of Lydia Maria Child 757
Index 773
About the author
Carolyn L. Karcher is Professor of English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Temple University.
Summary
Published in 1994, this is a paperback edition edition of a study of the life and writings of literary pioneer, Lydia Maria Child. Her writing made and impact on American life as she addressed the issues of her time: slavery, women's rights, treatm
