Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life
By Lydia Moland
University of Chicago Press 2022

“What had prepared her for that moment of conversion, and what had sustained her life of activism that followed?” asks Lydia Moland at the beginning of her big, impressive new biography, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life, referring to Child’s first meeting with William Lloyd Garrison. “And what could the example of her life teach me about how to live my own?” 

Moland’s book is the latest, the fullest, and by a noticeable margin the best biography of Lydia Maria Child (who’s, shamefully, best known to the general public as the author of the holiday ditty “Over the River and Through the Wood”), although that parting question, “and what could the example of her life teach me about how to live my own,” could give a reader the willies, since it smacks of the kind of 21st-century self-absorption that would survey the life of a brilliant and valiant abolitionist solely in order to help a biographer with their own feng shui. The reader, after all, shouldn’t have to care about how a biographer is living her life.

But those readers need not worry in this case, not only because Moland’s book is anything but shallow (its end notes and bibliography are refreshingly extensive) but because, in all honesty, it was, is, and always will be virtually impossible to know Lydia Maria Child and not ask how her example might teach you to better live your own life. It was an effect she had on almost everybody in her life, and she knew it, and she took it seriously.

She was a hustling writer, living off her pen for most of her life, using, as Moland puts it about one instance, “connections and concocting schemes, moving on to the next plan when the first failed.” She was “a radical and a pragmatist” who filled her life with deep friendships (none deeper than with her husband David Lee Child) and passionate causes, foremost that of abolition, to which she devoted her life. This particular passion was cemented by that meeting with William Lloyd Garrison, which Moland calls a conversion experience, “a moment after which she could never live her life in the same way again. A moment she had been prepared for, however unconsciously, by her curiosity, sympathy, and intellect, but a moment she neither could have predicted nor could now rescind.” 

Child was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1802 and published her first work, a novel called Hobomok, in 1824, kicking off a lifetime of writing for audiences on a wide array of topics. She became a prominent figure in the Boston literary world and used every ounce of that influence in her foremost chosen cause, the abolition of slavery. She wrote tirelessly on the subject and was good-naturedly philosophical about the enemies she made in the process — but she made friends too, and of course she had right on her side.

The generous length of her book allows Moland to explore every aspect of Child’s life in satisfying detail, and since this is an unabashedly affectionate biography (hardly a fault in this case; as Moland quite rightly points out what everybody who knew Child likewise pointed out – she knew “the art of living well”), readers will find this an affecting, emotional story, particularly as its major chapters draw to a close. As Child grew older, she pondered – and of course wrote about – how that feels, commenting to a friend about the evanescent nature of human life: “Capable of discovering so much that has preceded us, of fore-casting so much that will follow us, yet flitting across our small segment of time, and disappearing like shadows of the magic-lantern.”

This is nowhere in the book more powerfully done than in Child’s long, devoted attendance on her sickly, dying husband. Moland’s version of the final act of this drama is expertly orchestrated:

On a day in mid-September 1874, David felt well enough to tend his garden. But soon, familiar pains forced him back inside … As the afternoon wore on, the pain worsened, and Child stayed near. When, after nightfall, it became clear that his final hours had come, she took him into her arms and waiting in the darkness. A few minutes past midnight, his struggle was over and he breathed his last. “Your dear, kind brother passed away last night,” she wrote next morning to his sister. “He suffered greatly during the last three days,” she wrote to Sarah Shaw, “but at last sunk into sleep in my arms, as peacefully as a tired babe.” 

The final act of the book as a whole is far more openly aspirational, connecting perfectly with that open question about what Lydia Maria Child can teach other people about how to live their lives. “Imagine,” Moland writes, “Lydia Maria Child, still at work in the universe: inspiring, encouraging, exhorting, convicting, admonishing; urging those of us still bound by space and time to meet the challenges of our moral lives.” 

Hokey stuff for a biographer, admittedly, but even so justified – and infinitely preferable to the most likely alternative. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.