SOURCE: Mills, Bruce. “Literary Excellence and Social Reform: Lydia Maria Child's Ultraisms for the 1840s.” In American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Julie Brown, pp. 3-16. New York: Garland, 1995.

In the following essay, Mills analyzes Child's short stories in the context of her work as an abolitionist, social reformer, and transcendentalist.

Fifteen months after retiring from a tumultuous two-year editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Lydia Maria Child voiced astonishment over the literary success of Letters from New York (1845), a collection of journalistic transcendental essays first printed in the pages of her abolitionist newspaper. “The great popularity of [Letters] surprises me,” she wrote, “for it is full of ultraisms.” Encouraged by this success, Child announced that she meant “to devote the remainder of [her] life to the attainment of literary excellence” (Selected Letters 209). Between January 1845 and May 1848, her devotion to her art...