For half a century, from 1824, when Lydia Maria Child's daring novel of interracial marriage, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times, greeted a shocked public, to the turbulent Reconstruction era, which found her articles in the National Anti-Slavery Standard still calling for justice toward the beleaguered Plains Indians, advocating the extension of voting rights to blacks and women, and denouncing American imperialism in the Caribbean, Child's name was a household word in America. To retrace her career is to recapitulate the key struggles over the young Republic's political and cultural destiny--struggles over Indian policy, slavery, and woman's rights, and concomitantly, over the creation of a literature that would represent America to the world--for Child played an influential role in all these arenas.

Born in Medford, Massachusetts, the youngest of six children, Lydia Francis grew up in a milieu of "hard-working people, who had had small opportunity for culture," as...