23 Facts About Fanny Fern

Fanny Fern's popularity has been attributed to a conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers.

Fanny Fern sent samples of her work her own name to her brother Nathaniel, by then a magazine owner, but he refused them and said her writing was not marketable outside Boston.

Fanny Fern was proved wrong, as newspapers and periodicals in New York and elsewhere began printing Fanny Fern's "witty and irreverent columns".

Fanny Fern had to reveal her legal name to the publishers.

Fanny Fern published her columns and invited the author to New York City.

Fanny Fern's first book, Fanny Fern Leaves, was a best seller.

Fanny Fern received ten cents a copy in royalties, enough for her to buy a house in Brooklyn and live comfortably.

When Fanny Fern's identity was revealed shortly after the novel's publication, some critics believed it scandalous that she had attacked her own relatives; they decried her lack of filial piety and her want of "womanly gentleness" in such characterizations.

In 1859, Fanny Fern bought a brownstone in Manhattan at what is 303 East Eighteenth Street near Second Avenue.

Fanny Fern continued as a regular columnist for the Ledger for the remainder of her life.

Fanny Fern was a suffrage supporter, and in 1868 she co-founded Sorosis, New York City's pioneer club for women writers and artists.

Fanny Fern dealt with cancer for six years and died on October 10,1872.

Fanny Fern is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts next to her first husband.

Fanny Fern developed a writing style that closely reflected her pugnacious personality, with its common-sensical optimistic approach, always leavened with a dash of humor.

Fanny Fern was an individualist who sought answers to social problems through individual personality development rather than politicized organizational movements.

Fanny Fern did tackle such major issues as prostitution, divorce, child labor, and the horrors of slum living.

Fanny Fern was extremely successful in her lifetime as a columnist.

Fanny Fern was said to fit her material and subject matter to the audience.

Many readers of weekly literary papers were women, and Fanny Fern addressed them in a conversational style, often using interjections and exclamation points, while tackling topics that concerned the daily life of ordinary women.

Fanny Fern's readers were wives and mothers who worried about their children, current fashions, difficult husbands, and aggravating relatives.

Fanny 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.

The criticism showed women's lower status in society almost as well as Fanny Fern did in her work.

Fanny Fern was straightforward when she wrote of subjects such as men's economic and social victimization of women.