Sarah Payson Willis [Parton]

I am still going through the books my mother left me. You
may say, "What is taking him so long?", but I am enjoying
the slow process of figuring out why she collected what she
collected. That takes some time. I find an author I never
heard of, and I have to do some research to learn what she
learned decades before.


Tonight, I found the following: Fanny Fern, "Rose Clark"
(NY: Mason Brothers, 1856). Addall.com yielded a complete
zero, so I went off to KVK, where I found that The British
Library has several copies, and from which I learned that
Fanny Fern was a pseudonym for Sara [originally named Grata]
Payson Willis, later Eldredge, later Farrington, later
Parton. From articles found through Google, I learned that
she was born in Portland, Maine, in 1811, the same year that
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born. Curiously, she attended the
Catherine Beecher Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, and
must have come to know Harriet Beecher as a child. She
became a journalist, whose articles were published as
collections ["Fern Leaves" and "Little Ferns for Fanny's
Little Friends", which together sold 132,000 copies in the
USA and 48,000 abroad] and later in life a novelist [Ruth
Hall, Rose Clark]. Her writings mocked the double social
standards of the time and poked fun at male chauvinism.
Indeed, in the last 20 years there has been a substantial
upsurge in literary criticism about her writings. See
Selected Bibliography at
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reube...hap3/fern.html .
(I count 24 journal articles.) She was criticized for
praising Whitman's Leaves of Grass. She died in 1872. Four
years later her daughter Ellen (from her first marriage)
married her widowed husband, James Parton. And all this
about someone I had never heard of, but who turns out to be
one of America's early writers.


Francis A. Miniter

"Francis A. Miniter" wrote in message ...
I am still going through the books my mother left me. You
may say, "What is taking him so long?", but I am enjoying
the slow process of figuring out why she collected what she
collected. That takes some time. I find an author I never
heard of, and I have to do some research to learn what she
learned decades before.


Tonight, I found the following: Fanny Fern, "Rose Clark"
(NY: Mason Brothers, 1856). Addall.com yielded a complete
zero, so I went off to KVK, where I found that The British
Library has several copies, and from which I learned that
Fanny Fern was a pseudonym for Sara [originally named Grata]
Payson Willis, later Eldredge, later Farrington, later
Parton. From articles found through Google, I learned that
she was born in Portland, Maine, in 1811, the same year that
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born. Curiously, she attended the
Catherine Beecher Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, and
must have come to know Harriet Beecher as a child. She
became a journalist, whose articles were published as
collections ["Fern Leaves" and "Little Ferns for Fanny's
Little Friends", which together sold 132,000 copies in the
USA and 48,000 abroad] and later in life a novelist [Ruth
Hall, Rose Clark]. Her writings mocked the double social
standards of the time and poked fun at male chauvinism.
Indeed, in the last 20 years there has been a substantial
upsurge in literary criticism about her writings. See
Selected Bibliography at
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reube...hap3/fern.html .
(I count 24 journal articles.) She was criticized for
praising Whitman's Leaves of Grass. She died in 1872. Four
years later her daughter Ellen (from her first marriage)
married her widowed husband, James Parton. And all this
about someone I had never heard of, but who turns out to be
one of America's early writers.


Francis A. Miniter

I once drove clear across Massachussetts from New York State to Auburn
Cemetery in Watertown (Cambridge) to visit Fanny Fern's grave. It's a
cross covered with ferns and was erected by her friend publisher
Robert Bonner. Fanny's brother was poet/author N.P.Willis. Like Fanny,
he's largely forgotten now, but he was a really big name in his
heyday. James Parton was also an editor and author who wrote a
biography of Horace Greeley, among others. I also think that one of
Fanny Fern's daughters married Mortimer Thomson, a journalist and
humorist who wrote satire under the name "Doesticks" and who wrote a
rather remarkable account of the auction of slaves from the estate of
Pierce Butler, the husband of Fanny Kemble, the nineteenth century
actress. The game of "six degrees of separation" is a lot easier in
the nineteenth century. I have photos of Fanny Fern, N.P. Willis and
Robert Bonner, if you're interested.

Bill Nelson