Early Lost examines scenes of child death and separation in nineteenth-century American Women’s writing, with an emphasis on texts by abolitionist writers in the antebellum period. Drawing on studies of print culture and theorists of the “temporal turn,” I explore the challenges and pitfalls of incorporating child death into a national narrative of progress. In particular, Early Lost concentrates on the bereaved mother figure. Adopting the phrase “regulation” from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to articulate the disciplinary processes embedded in sentimental scripts of motherhood and grief, Early Lost discusses texts by women which linger in the temporal disorder of bereavement through scenes of suspension, disjunction, and delay. This dissertation begins its study of unregulated feeling with Margaret Garner’s infanticide as told in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio.” Through a consideration of Harper’s Romantic postures and contributions to the ballad form, this chapter argues that Harper’s uses of voice and repetition stage a resistance against sentimental modes of confession and sympathy. Early Lost continues with a reading of Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New York and Fact and Fiction, which examine the violence the legal system enacts on mothers and the challenges of rehabilitating fallen women. This chapter tracks the use of the dash in works by Child, Charles Dickens, and Susanna Rowson to examine how syntactic delays mark death, discipline, and pause in narratives of social and physical death. Finally, the third chapter reads the friendship albums of Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society member Mary Anne Dickerson and the collaborative memorialization of Dickerson’s son William in its pages.This chapter argues that the entries from Dickerson, her teacher, and her family worked together to create a multitemporal text that captures the complex temporality of mourning. The resulting portrait of Black matrilineality critiques the exclusion of Black children and women from sentimental ideals of childhood and womanhood. Early Lost contends that the friction between popular notions of motherly grief and the experiences of bereaved parents was not rare in the nineteenth century, but constant. Each of these texts study the conversion of a real woman’s story into text, highlighting the personal, social, and political implications of that writing or recording process.