I was surprised to learn, after reading this letter, that she was married when she wrote it, and had been for eleven years. She sounds so stalwart and alone! But according to the American National Biography, she had every reason to trust in her own self-sufficiency:

At the height of her popularity she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), which called for immediate emancipation (without compensation to owners) and racial equality as well as argued against colonization in Africa. . . Child was almost immediately ostracized by a public that formerly had adored her.

She and her husband had never been rich, and their poverty was compounded by this ostracization and by her husband’s attempts to “raise sugar beets as an alternative to slave-produced sugarcane” which proved “a dismal failure.”

In the 1840s, Childs legally separated her finances from her husbands’. The American National Biography doesn’t give much other detail about their personal lives during this decade, but notes that, “following an estrangement of nearly a decade, the Childs had permanently reconciled by 1852.”

Whether or not she ever visited with Miss Lynch is another question. Miss Lynch turns out to have been Anne Lynch Botta, who went on to run a well-known literary salon in Rhode Island that, by 1943, would be considered “the very best literary society of Providence.” Years later, Botta would move to New York, where she would introduce a young Edgar Allen Poe into literary society.

And, um, I should get back to working on my paper for Information and Society now. All the quotations I pulled for this comment are from the American National Biography, which, if you’re lucky, can be found at your local library.

So Mary, I do not think it weird if you post this for your status. It seems so early 19th century.