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.
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- Prologue: A Passion for Books
- Chapter 1. The Author of Hobomok
- Chapter 2. Rebels and "Rivals": Self Portraits of a Conflicted Young Artist
- Chapter 3. The Juvenile Miscellany: The Creation of an American Children's Literature
- Chapter 4. A Marriage of True Minds: Espousing the Indian Cause
- Chapter 5. Blighted Prospects: Indian Fiction and Domestic Reality
- Chapter 6. The Frugal Housewife: Financial Worries and Domestic Advice
- Chapter 7. Children's Literature and Antislavery: Conservative Medium, Radical Message
- Chapter 8. "The First Woman in the Republic": An Antislavery Baptism
- Chapter 9. An Antislavery Marriage: Careers at Cross Purposes
- Chapter 10. The Condition of Women: Double Binds, Unresolved Conflicts
- Chapter 11. Schisms, Personal and Political
- Chapter 12. The National Anti-Slavery Standard: Family Newspaper or Factional Organ?
- Chapter 13. Letters from New York: The Invention of a New Literary Genre
- Chapter 14. Sexuality and Marriage in Fact and Fiction
- Chapter 15. The Progress of Religious Ideas: A "Pilgrimage of Penance"
- Chapter 16. Autumnal Leaves: Reconsecrated Partnerships, Personal and Political
- Chapter 17. The Example of John Brown
- Chapter 18. Child's Civil War
- Chapter 19. Visions of a Reconstructed America: The Freedmen's Book and A Romance of the Republic
- Chapter 20. A Radical Old Age
- Chapter 21. Aspirations of the World
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works of Lydia Maria Child
- Index
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