Fanny Fern (July 9, 1811 — October 10, 1872) was the pseudonym of Sara Willis Parton. She was a popular American 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.
Her best-known work, the fictionalized autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a favorite with feminist literary scholars.
Sarah Payson Willis was born in Portland, Maine, to newspaper-owner Nathaniel Willis and Hannah Parker; she was the fifth of eight siblings, including journalist Nathaniel Parker Willis. Another brother, Richard Storrs Willis, became a musician and music journalist known for writing the melody for "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear". Her other siblings were Lucy Douglas (born 1804), Louisa Harris (1807), Julia Dean (1809), Mary Perry (1813), Edward Payson (1816), and Ellen Holmes (1821).
Her father had recently become very religious after being inspired by Reverend Edward Payson of Portland's Second Congregational Church and intended to name his fifth child after him. When his fifth child turned out to be a girl, he instead decided to name her after Payson's mother, Grata Payson, though the Reverend urged the Willises to reconsider, noting that his mother never liked the name. Her name was to change often in her life throughout three marriages and with the adoption of her chosen 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."
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. 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 Christian newspapers, The Puritan Recorder and The Youth's Companion.
Fern married Charles Harrington Eldredge, a banker, 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. 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 and she soon followed his suggestion.
Writing in earnest
Fern married Samuel P. Farrington, a merchant, in 1849. The marriage was a mistake; unable to cope with her new husband's intense jealousy, she scandalized her family by leaving him in 1851. and they were divorced two years later.
Fern first published a few short satirical works in the Boston newspapers Olive Branch and True Flag. In 1852, again on her own with two daughters to support, Fern began her writing career in earnest. She sent some samples of her work using her real name to her brother, Nathaniel Willis, who rudely refused them and said that her writing was not marketable outside Boston. Her brother was proved wrong, as newspapers and periodicals in New York and elsewhere began printing the "witty and irreverent columns". 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, 1853, 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. The former sold 70,000 copies in its first year.
Highest paid columnist
James Parton a biographer and historian, who was editing the magazine Home Journal, owned by Fern's brother Nathaniel Parker Willis, was impressed by Fern's work. He not only printed her columns but invited the author to come to New York City. When Nathaniel Willis discovered this he forbade Parton from printing any more of her work. Parton refused to obey the request and promptly resigned as editor of the magazine.
Fern's first book, Fern Leaves (1853), was a best seller. It sold 46,000 copies in the first four months, and over 70,000 copies the first year. She received ten cents a copy in royalties, enough 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 United States. Her first regular column appeared on January 5, 1856, and would run weekly, without exception, until October 12, 1872, when her last edition was printed two days after her death.
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 Nathaniel, 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. 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.
In Fanny's Ledger column from May 10, 1856, she defended Walt Whitman when she wrote a favorable review of his controversial Leaves of Grass. In particular, she noted his fearless individualism and self-reliance, as well as his honest and "undraped" portrayal of sex and the human body. She was criticized for her admiration, but her outspoken support marked her as a champion of literature that was ahead of its time. It has been suggested that Whitman imitated her Fern Leaves in his choice of cover art for the first edition.
Sara Willis and James Parton were married in 1856. She and her husband lived in New York City with one of her two surviving children , they also raised a granddaughter, Ethel, the orphaned child of Willis's daughter Grace, who passed away in 1862.
In 1859, Fern moved to a brownstone in Manhattan at what is now 303 East Eighteenth Street near Second Avenue; she would live in this house for the next 13 years until her death. Fern continued as a regular columnist for the Ledger for the remainder of her life. She was a suffrage supporter and in 1868 she co-founded Sorosis, New York City's pioneer woman's club. Fern battled cancer for six years and died October 10, 1872. She is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts next to her first husband. Her gravestone was inscribed simply "Fanny Fern." After her death her husband, James Parton, published Fanny Fern: A Memorial Volume (1874).
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.
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? Nathaniel Hawthorne praised her as an exception to the "damned mob of scribbling women", who wrote "as if the devil was in her". Fern was not afraid to be straightforward when she spoke of subjects such as men's economic and social victimization of women.
Fanny Fern is credited with coining the phrase, "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach".
Henry D. Butler dedicated his 1858 book The Family Aquarium to "the gifted litterateuse whose nom de plume is 'Fanny Fern'"
Fern's granddaughter Ethel Willis Parton became a correspondent for the periodical The Youth's Companion (founded by her great-grandfather, Nathaniel Willis).
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."
Susan Stoderl has written an opera about Fern titled A.F.R.A.I.D. (American Females for Righteousness Abasement Ignorance & Docillity), which was premiered as the inaugural show of the Brooklyn Repertory Opera, premiering at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2005.[2]
