Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) wrote or edited more than fifty works between 1824 and 1878, including historical novels, domestic manuals, biographies of famous women, transcendental essays, and groundbreaking abolitionist texts. Her career was influenced by intimate ties to Boston Brahmin George Ticknor, abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Maria Chapman, and the Grimke sisters, and transcendentalists Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Convers Francis, Child's brother.

Although her work has been overshadowed by more prominent contemporaries, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Child has emerged as a figure central to any cultural analysis of antebellum America. In Cultural Reformations, Bruce Mills examines how Child, centrally connected to major literary and social reforms, strove to redefine cultural boundaries concerning race and gender.

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By juxtaposing Child's representative works with such cultural documents of the period as private correspondence, sermons, and newspaper editorials, Mills contextualizes her key works as he advances a deeper understanding of Child herself and of a more tempered some of literary reform. Mills demonstrates how Child's writings reveal the cultural negotiations that fostered the sensational heroines of "sentimental" fiction as well as the ambiguity and indirectness of transcendental writing.

What distinguishes Child's texts is their fresh look into a literary culture constructing myths of self-reliance while struggling with the issues of slavery and Indian removal. Her work reveals the contradictions inherent in elevating individualism while trying to promote more hopeful images of racially and ethnically diverse communities.

1. Cultural Reformations makes a significant contribution to the study of antebellum literature and culture. By tracing a pattern of literary reform that contrasts sharply with the jeremiads of Stowe or Garrison, Mills fosters a richer appreciation of the seeming indirectness of Child and, by implication, other such widely recognized transcendentalists as Emerson and Fuller.