Fanny Fern

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Fanny Fern (July 9, 1811-October 10, 1872) was the pseudonym of Sara Willis Parton. She was a popular columnist, humorist, novelist, and author of children's stories in the 1850s-1870s. Her immense popularity has been attributed to her conversational style and the immediacy of her topics to her mostly middle-class female audience. In 1852, she became the first female writer with her own regular column; by 1855, she commanded $100 per week for her New York Ledger column and was the highest-paid newspaper writer in the United States.^[1]

Her best-known work, the fictionalised autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a favorite with feminist literary scholars such as Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Published works 3 Literary criticism 4 Further information 5 References

[edit] Biography

Sarah Payson Willis was born in Portland, Maine, to newspaper-owner Nathaniel Willis and Hannah Willis; she was the fifth of eight siblings, including journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis.^[2] Her name at birth was Grata Payson Sara Willis. Her father insisted on naming her "Grata Payson" after the mother of a minister he admired, but the rest of the family, including her, disliked "Grata" and she soon became "Sara." Her name was to change often in her life, and her names were symbolic to her--with the decision to not go by Grata, she distanced herself from her father's orthodox religiousness. Her name changed again through three marriages. When she began writing, she chose the pen name "Fanny Fern". She decided on the name because it reminded her of childhood memories of her mother picking fern leaves. She felt that this name was a better fit for her, and used it even in her personal life; eventually, most of her friends and family called her "Fanny." When she died, her gravestone was inscribed only as "Fanny Fern." ^[3]

Fern attended Catharine Beecher's boarding school in Hartford, Connecticut; here, although Beecher later described her as one of her "worst-behaved girls" (adding that she also "loved her the best"), she got her first taste of literary success when her compositions were published in the local newspaper.^[4] She was also sent to the Saugus Female Seminary [1]. She then returned to her parents' home, where she wrote and edited articles for her father's newspaper, The Puritan Recorder. ^[5] She married Charles Harrington Eldredge, a bank cashier, in 1837, and they had three daughters: Mary Stace (1838), Grace Harrington (1841), and Ellen Willis (1844). After seven happy years, tragedy struck: Fern's mother and younger sister Ellen died early in 1844; then, in 1845, her eldest daughter Mary died of brain fever; soon afterward, her husband Charles succumbed to typhoid fever. ^[6] Fern was left nearly destitute. With little help from either her father or her in-laws – and none at all from her brother Nathaniel – she and her two remaining daughters struggled to make ends meet. Her father persuaded her to remarry; she followed his suggestion and married Samuel P. Farrington, a merchant, in 1849. The marriage was a mistake; unable to cope with her new husband's intense jealousy, she scandalised her family by leaving him in 1851. ^[7]

Fern first published a few short satirical works in the Boston newspapers Olive Branch and True Flag. ^[8] In 1852, again on her own with two daughters to support, Fern began her writing career in earnest. She began writing a regular column in the New York newspaper Musical World and Times that year, becoming the first woman to write her own regular column; the next year she published both Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio, a selection of her more sentimental columns, and Little Ferns for Fanny's Little Friends, a children's book. In 1853 her divorce from Farrington was finalized. Within a year, her Fern Leaves sold nearly 100,000 copies in England and America. She received ten cents a copy in royalties, plenty for her to buy a house in Brooklyn, New York, and live comfortably. Just three years into her career, in 1855, she was earning $100 a week for her column in the New York Ledger--making her the highest paid columnist in the country. She wrote prolifically over the next twenty years, publishing in various newspapers.

Fern also wrote two novels. Her first, Ruth Hall (1854) describes her few years of happiness with Eldredge, the poverty and humiliation she endured after he died, and her struggle to achieve financial independence as a journalist. Most of the characters are thinly-veiled versions of people Fern knew, and several – those individuals who treated her uncharitably when she most needed their help, including her father, her in-laws, her brother, and two newspaper editors – are put in a most unflattering light. When Fern's identity was exposed shortly after the novel's publication, some critics were scandalised at this lampooning of her own relatives, and decried her lack of filial piety and her want of "womanly gentleness" in seeking revenge in this manner.^[9]The criticism wounded Fern deeply, and her second novel, Rose Clark, is less autobiographical in nature and features a conventionally sweet, gentle heroine; a secondary character, however, reenacts the debacle of Fern's marriage of convenience to Farrington.

Overall, Fanny Fern produced two novels, six collections of columns, and three books for children.^[10] She is also credited with coining the phrase, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach."

In 1856, Fern married again, this time to a biographer, James Parton. Their marriage lasted the rest of her life. Her daughter, Grace, died in 1863. Fern continued writing prolifically, and in 1868 she helped to form Sorosis, a women's press organization. She died of cancer on October 10, 1872.^[11] She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts next to her first husband.

[edit] Published works

Column collections

• Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio (1853) Fern's first book, and best-selling: it sold 46,000 copies in the first four months, and over 70,000 in a year.
• Fern Leaves, second series (1854)
• Fresh Leaves (1857)
• Folly As It Flies (1868)
• Ginger-Snaps (1870)
• Caper-Sauce (1872)

Novels

• Ruth Hall (1854) Autobiographical; this is her most well-known work to modern readers.
• Rose Clark (1856)

Children's books

• Little Ferns for Fanny's Little Friends (1853)
• The Play-Day Book (1857)
• The New Story Book for Children (1864) ^[12]

[edit] Literary criticism

Fern was extremely successful in her lifetime as a columnist. The most cited reason was the way she fit her material and subject matter to the audience. Many readers of weekly literary papers were women, and Fern addressed them in a conversational style, often using interjections and plenty of exclamation points, addressing subjects that concerned the everyday life of everyday women. Her readers were wives and mothers who worried about their children, current fashions, difficult husbands, and aggravating relatives. Sometimes they felt oppressed, depressed, or stressed. Fern expressed their problems in plain language, addressing women's suffrage, the woman's right to her children in a divorce, unfaithful husbands, social customs that restricted women's freedom, and sometimes just having a bad day. ^[13]

However, her strengths in relating to her audience were also considered her weaknesses by many critics. Her conversational style was sometimes called unprofessional, feminine, and too spontaneous. Many critics did not want to take seriously someone who wrote "Humph!" in an article, and labeled her as "sentimental." However, this led to counter-criticism about what exactly "sentimental" writing is, and why it is considered bad. The criticism made the point about women's status in society almost as well as she did in her work--who decides the standards by which literature is judged, and who does the judging? ^[14] Nathaniel Hawthorne praised her as an exception to the "damned mob of scribbling women," who wrote "as if the devil was in her".^[15] Fern was not afraid to be straightforward when she spoke of subjects such as men's economic and social victimization of women. ^[16]

[edit] Further information

• Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (1992), by Joyce W. Warren, is considered the standard biography. ^[17]
• Fanny Fern (1993), by Nancy A. Walker, gives an overview of Fern's writings. ^[18]
• Bibliography of literary criticism and picture of Fern
• Fern is also noted as being the first female author to praise Walt Whitman when she wrote a review of Leaves of Grass. She was criticized for her admiration, as his work was quite controversial at the time. ^[19] It has been suggested that Whitman imitated her Fern Leaves in his choice of cover art for the first edition. ^[20]
• In Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, the "Mr. Bruce" who Jacobs worked for was modeled after N. P. Willis, Fern's brother. Fern satirized her social-climbing brother in "Apollo Hyacinth." ^[21]
• http://slapcast.com/users/revry/ --Many Fanny Fern stories are read in the Mister Ron's Basement Podcast (Episode #s 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 274, 337, 522, 523, 524, 525, 670, 836, 837, 838, 839, 843, 844, 845, and 846)

[edit] References