by Carolyn L. Karcher
Duke University Press, 1998
Paper: 978-0-8223-2163-7 | Cloth: 978-0-8223-1485-1 | eISBN: 978-0-8223-9838-7
Library of Congress Classification HQ1413.C45K37 1994

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ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.