In 1867, young, fledgling author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wrote a tribute to the work of her equally young contemporary, Rebecca Harding Davis. Davis's work, Phelps exclaimed, “made you feel as if she knew all about you, and were sorry for you, and as if she thought nobody was too poor, or too uneducated or too worn-out with washing days, and all the things that do not sound a bit grand in books, to be written about” (“At Bay,” 780). As this chapter will suggest, both writers expressed reformist sentiments by writing passionately of the pressing social ills of their times. However, Phelps and Davis also developed a literary form devoted, as Phelps noted of Davis's work, to “knowing all about us” and the internal struggles that, she claims presciently, “do not sound a bit grand in books.” Though Phelps and Davis acknowledged their thematic and philosophical kinship, few students of American women writers have explored the sophisticated nature of the reform literature that the two friends developed simultaneously during the next five decades. Their work, and the critical responses it has elicited, has much to teach us: about the limits of generic classifications and the perils of literary history; about the continuing need for critical work that elucidates the many American women writers who remain if not “lost,” at least hidden; and about the utility of creating new connections between an author and her various texts, as well as between an author and her fellow writers. We must look not only to Phelps's and Davis's adult fiction, but also to their essays, autobiographies, and juvenile texts to discover the fullness of their thought. While individually they have failed to compel significant critical attention, the intertextual conversation the two carried on reveals a more complicated notion of reform fiction than is allowed under current understandings of the genre.