A close look at a 19th-century author and abolitionist that
integrates her personal life, her work, and the eventful period in
US history during which she lived. Karcher (English, American
Studies, Women's Studies/Temple Univ.; Shadow Over the Promised
Land, not reviewed) is a staunch advocate of her subject, tracing
the "trajectory" of Child's life from her earliest fiction through
her anti-slavery work and later advocacy of women's and Indian's
rights. Child (1802 - 80), who entered the literary limelight with
Hobomok, a novel sympathetic to Indians and hostile to patriarchy,
compounded her success by founding Juvenile Miscellany, a hugely
popular children's magazine. But love came to Child at a high
price: Her husband, newspaper editor David Lee Child, was a
terrible businessman who accumulated debts faster than she could
cover them. Karcher, clearly appalled by a woman "abasing herself
to the husband responsible for sabotaging her career," indicates
that Child's early opposition to gender equality could have been
rooted in devotion to her marriage. Need for cash drove her to
write on domestic economy, but after an 1830 meeting with
abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, her life and writings acquired
a greater goal. With the publication of her first major work on
slavery, Child's formerly adoring public became incensed, the
Juvenile Miscellany folded, and her activities as an anti-slavery
activist put her in danger (as Karcher's comments on mob violence
effectively indicate). Karcher is at her best when Child herself is
a lion; less impressive are the occasional psychological
speculations (e.g., on the possible connection in Child's mind
between abolitionist John Brown and her parents) and excuses for
Child not meeting late-20th-century standards for political
correctness (e.g., depression and housework kept her from fighting
the Fugitive Slave Law). This valuable portrait of a complex and
talented woman may be most notable for indicating the extent to
which she was of - rather than ahead of - her time. (Kirkus
Reviews)
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.
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