![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern (1854)
Dec. 8th, 2016 06:10 pmA letter to the editor in an 1873 magazine reported the sighting of a fancy dining railroad car in Cleveland, called the FANNY FERN. The conductor who had sighted it wrote 'as I looked at it, the many truths she has written came to my mind, and I said to myself, Fanny Fern's name is one that will be remembered as long as memory lasts'.
And sadly I had not heard of her, though she has had an afterlife of sorts, including a 2005 opera of her life titled A.F.R.A.I.D. (American Females for Righteousness Abasement Ignorance & Docillity).
But she is well worth reading.
Fanny Fern was the pseudonym of Sarah Willis Parton who began writing to support herself after the death of her first husband. Nightmarishly, she lost her husband, mother and eldest child in two years, and was left a widow with two young children. Her parents refused to support her, arguing that she was the responsibility of her husband’s family. Her in-laws also refused to support her financially, as did her extremely well off brother.
She began writing for the newspapers in desperation, as the usual sources of support for a middle class woman of the time had failed her. (It should be noted that her brother was an editor who could have helped her out in this career but chose not to.)
She wrote in a lively, conversational manner about matters of interest to women – fashion, courting, marriage, children – and she was very popular She wrote as a nineteenth-century feminist and supported women’s rights to divorce, to have guardianship of their children, opposed wife beating, and supported the right to vote. She was keen on prison reform and also that big nineteenth-century thing where they took kids out of the slums on the east coast and sent them out as free labour to the frontier. Which presumably seemed like a good idea at the time though it just looks like the stolen generation to me.
In 1855, the already-famous Fanny Fern began writing for Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger at the unheard-of (and highly publicized) rate of $100 per column of type. Within a year, the Ledger’s circulation had increased by 100,000 subscribers and had become the highest-circulating periodical to that point in American history. Fern’s column ran weekly, without a single interruption, until her death in1872.
Her collected articles were printed as books, beginning with *Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio* in 1853 and ending with *Caper Sauce* in 1872. However, her personal life continued to be rocky, as she divorced her second husband in 1853. She married a third time in 1856, to a man a decade her junior who agreed to sign a contract accepting that her personal property and income would remain hers alone.
Fern wrote only a handful of novels, and the most popular was *Ruth Hall* (1854), an extremely thinly veiled autobiography in which Fern got her revenge on her family and her in-laws by describing the events of her life in fiction. Her in-laws were portrayed as moustache-twirlingly evil. Her brother became Hyacinth Hall, and calling him Hyacinth was practically a revenge in itself. She published them under the name Fern but those in the know immediately identified who she was writing about, which really seems to serve them right.
*Ruth Hall* isn’t a brilliant work, except for the visceral hatred that it expresses for her in-laws who are described as selfish, penny-pinching, ignorant, unkempt, sanctimonious, lying, prying, bullying, child-stealing, physically abusive villains who are also entirely physically repulsive and slightly greasy. Her father and brother-in-law come off relatively lightly in comparison, being described as merely cold, stupid, selfish and vain. I have to turn to Dickens to find characters that are equally repulsive, and even then it’s not Fagin who, despite his greasy nastiness at least provides Oliver with some sausages and a roof over his head. The only comparably villainous nineteenth-century characters I can think are at the Bill Sykes level of total evil.
In short, Fern got her revenge both through a life well lived and also by naming and shaming her family in the most public of ways.
And sadly I had not heard of her, though she has had an afterlife of sorts, including a 2005 opera of her life titled A.F.R.A.I.D. (American Females for Righteousness Abasement Ignorance & Docillity).
But she is well worth reading.
Fanny Fern was the pseudonym of Sarah Willis Parton who began writing to support herself after the death of her first husband. Nightmarishly, she lost her husband, mother and eldest child in two years, and was left a widow with two young children. Her parents refused to support her, arguing that she was the responsibility of her husband’s family. Her in-laws also refused to support her financially, as did her extremely well off brother.
She began writing for the newspapers in desperation, as the usual sources of support for a middle class woman of the time had failed her. (It should be noted that her brother was an editor who could have helped her out in this career but chose not to.)
She wrote in a lively, conversational manner about matters of interest to women – fashion, courting, marriage, children – and she was very popular She wrote as a nineteenth-century feminist and supported women’s rights to divorce, to have guardianship of their children, opposed wife beating, and supported the right to vote. She was keen on prison reform and also that big nineteenth-century thing where they took kids out of the slums on the east coast and sent them out as free labour to the frontier. Which presumably seemed like a good idea at the time though it just looks like the stolen generation to me.
In 1855, the already-famous Fanny Fern began writing for Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger at the unheard-of (and highly publicized) rate of $100 per column of type. Within a year, the Ledger’s circulation had increased by 100,000 subscribers and had become the highest-circulating periodical to that point in American history. Fern’s column ran weekly, without a single interruption, until her death in1872.
Her collected articles were printed as books, beginning with *Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio* in 1853 and ending with *Caper Sauce* in 1872. However, her personal life continued to be rocky, as she divorced her second husband in 1853. She married a third time in 1856, to a man a decade her junior who agreed to sign a contract accepting that her personal property and income would remain hers alone.
Fern wrote only a handful of novels, and the most popular was *Ruth Hall* (1854), an extremely thinly veiled autobiography in which Fern got her revenge on her family and her in-laws by describing the events of her life in fiction. Her in-laws were portrayed as moustache-twirlingly evil. Her brother became Hyacinth Hall, and calling him Hyacinth was practically a revenge in itself. She published them under the name Fern but those in the know immediately identified who she was writing about, which really seems to serve them right.
*Ruth Hall* isn’t a brilliant work, except for the visceral hatred that it expresses for her in-laws who are described as selfish, penny-pinching, ignorant, unkempt, sanctimonious, lying, prying, bullying, child-stealing, physically abusive villains who are also entirely physically repulsive and slightly greasy. Her father and brother-in-law come off relatively lightly in comparison, being described as merely cold, stupid, selfish and vain. I have to turn to Dickens to find characters that are equally repulsive, and even then it’s not Fagin who, despite his greasy nastiness at least provides Oliver with some sausages and a roof over his head. The only comparably villainous nineteenth-century characters I can think are at the Bill Sykes level of total evil.
In short, Fern got her revenge both through a life well lived and also by naming and shaming her family in the most public of ways.
