Lydia Maria Child has largely fallen out of public consciousness, though she remains popular among literary scholars and historians who study abolition, and her poem “Over the River and through the Wood” is still recited today. The author now best known for a children's poem may not seem relevant to modern life, but Lydia Moland's biography aims to radically shift the author's position in American culture. She situates the writer-thinker as a model for anyone grappling with the difficult questions that dominate twenty-first century life. Moland's biography is ambitious, but she does an exceptional job of establishing how Lydia Maria Child continues to speak to us two hundred years later.
Moland begins with a “Personal Prologue,” a short essay that traces how she found and approached her subject. Moland, a scholar of philosophy, admits to being drawn to Child's writings about abolition, but tempers her academic excitement with a particularly...