Sylvester Judd's Margaret. A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom; Including Sketches of a Place Not Before Described, Called Mons Christi (1845) was hailed by James Russell Lowell in A Fable for Critics (1848) as "the first Yankee book / With the soul of Down East in't." In his article "Longfellow's Kavanagh: Nationality in Literature," for The North American Review (July 1849), Lowell called Margaret "the most emphatically American book ever written," and in his review of the novel for the National Anti-Slavery Standard (24 January 1850) Lowell called it "one of the most original books yet written in America." As might be expected from the author of The Biglow Papers (1848 and 1862), Lowell was primarily interested in the colorful New Englandness of the novel and in its homespun language; today, however, the novel, while also valued for those qualities, is known chiefly for its Emersonian overtones. Lydia Maria Child's Philothea (1836), the...