Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America

Private Woman, Public Stage

Private Woman, Public Stage

Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America

MARY KELLEY

With a New Preface by the Author

© 1984 Mary Kelley

Preface © 2002 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Originally published by Oxford University Press, Inc., in 1984.

Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kelley, Mary, 1943-

Private woman, public stage : literary domesticity in

nineteenth-century America / by Mary Kelley

p. cm. Originally published: New York :

Oxford University Press, C1984. With new pref.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-8078-5422-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—United States—History— 19th century. 3. American fiction — 19th century—History and criticism. 4. Domestic fiction, American—History and criticism. 5. Women—United States—History — 19th century. 6. Authors, American — 19th century—Biography. 7. Women—Books and reading—United States. 8. Women— United States—Intellectual life. 9. Women authors, American—Biography. 10. Authorship—Sex differences. 11. Public opinion in literature. 12. Sex role in literature. 13. Privacy in literature. 14. Women in literature. I. Title.

PS374.W6K4    2002

813'.309928 7—dc21      2002023494

06  05  04  03  02    5  4  3  2  1

Contents

Preface

PART I Peculiar Circumstances

CHAPTER ONE The Fanny Fern

CHAPTER TWO Fame Never Was

CHAPTER THREE The Season of Instruction

CHAPTER FOUR Rights of the Mind, Duties to the Sphere

PART II The Notice of The World

CHAPTER FIVE Sewet Writers

CHAPTER SIX No Happy Woman Writes

CHAPTER SEVEN Buying My Time

CHAPTER EIGHT A Man’s Clothing

PART III Warfare Within

CHAPTER NINE The Crisis of Domesticity: A Crisis of Being

CHAPTER TEN The Great (Question of Moral Life

CHAPTER ELEVEN Preachers of the Fictional Page

CHAPTER TWELVE A Right Regard for Womanhood: A Word or Two on All Sides

Epilogue

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliographical Note

Index

Preface

Private Woman, Public Stage began long before it took form as the book that was published in 1984. When I decided nearly thirty years ago to leave a promising (and what then looked to be a decidedly more secure) position at Time Magazine to pursue a career as a historian, I was already exploring some of the questions that inform this study. I wondered then if women had a history, and if they did, why there were so few traces of that history in the books I had read as an undergraduate student. Having been educated at a women’s college and now committed to an academic career, I was most interested in the schooling women had pursued, in the professional and personal choices they had made, and, more generally, in the intellectual history they had left to be written.

Finding a place to study the broader field of intellectual history was easy enough. I was fortunate in my choices—Stow Persons as a mentor and the University of Iowa for graduate school. I discovered another mentor the autumn I came to Iowa City—Linda Kerber, who had also arrived in 1971. When Kerber joined Iowa’s all-male History Department, she was asked by her colleagues to teach a course in the history of women in the United States. Today, with the thousands of women’s studies courses available at hundreds of colleges and universities, it is difficult to recall that once there were none. Perhaps because some skepticism still lingers, it is less difficult to remember the protracted struggles to establish women’s history as a legitimate field of inquiry. Kerber did not have to defend the field of women’s history or its incorporation into Iowa’s curriculum; instead, she was asked only if she wished to have the course on women in the United States scheduled Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday. I took that course, which marked the beginning of my formal engagement with women’s history. Within a year, I was embarking on the rite that all who pursue a Ph.D. soon experience— searching for a dissertation topic. The subject would be women, the century, the nineteenth—that I already knew. It did not take me long to decide that I would focus on literary women, a subject that brought together my twin interests in intellectual history and in the history of women. It took only a little more time to decide that I would focus on ten women who entered the literary marketplace in the decades between 1820 and 1880 and published hundreds of commercially successful novels and stories.¹

From the arduous process of transformation, also known as revise and edit, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America emerged from that dissertation. The book took a different turn from the thesis, which had focused more on the novels and stories than on the lives of the writers. In contrast to the dissertation, in which I had relied on fictional representations as evidence, Private Woman, Public Stage became a historical study based primarily on archival sources. I also increased the number of individuals considered by adding Mary Jane Holmes, Maria McIntosh, and Mary Virginia Terhune to a cast of characters that already included Maria Cummins, Caroline Howard Gilman, Caroline Lee Hentz, Sara Parton, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Augusta Evans Wilson.²

In retrospect, I see that the summer I returned to Time Magazine to fund the archival research for the dissertation and the subsequent two months I spent canvassing depositories from Boston, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina, had been only a beginning. And a rudimentary beginning at that, at least in terms of the guides to collections where I might find the letters, diaries, and journals of these writers. American Literary Manuscripts, then the only source, took me from North to South as I examined collections at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library Company, and the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library, with visits in between to the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Radcliffe College’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, the South Carolina Historical Society, and the Stowe-Day Memorial Library. Cursory notations in American Literary Manuscripts led to the discovery of collections that were much more rich and diverse than I had anticipated. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society. There researchers such as myself have discovered 21 boxes of Sedgwick’s manuscripts and an additional 169 boxes of the Sedgwick Family Papers.³

My decision to look more closely at the writers and the larger historical context in which they pursued their careers made research in letters, diaries, and journals all the more vital to the transformation of the thesis into the book. When I did return to the archives, I had a second guide—the 1,095-page Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections, which pointed the way to a host of other depositories, including the Pierpont Morgan Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Public Library, the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, and the Henry E. Huntington Library. Women’s History Sources also alerted me to Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collection with its cache of letters documenting the parallels between the struggles of a widowed Sara Parton, left to support herself and two daughters, and Ruth Hall, the heroine of Parton’s most popular novel. A notation on the Constitution Island Association led to a collection of Susan Warner’s journals that researchers presumed had been lost. Tucked away on a shelf at the public library in Highland Falls, New York, Warner’s journals record her father’s successful law practice in New York City, the irreversible losses he suffered in the Panic of 1837, the family’s removal to their summer cottage on Constitution Island, and the increasingly straitened circumstances that led daughters Susan and Anna to embark on their literary careers.⁴

Private Woman, Public Stage elaborated on the intellectual and cultural context in which all these women pursued their careers. The manuscript research in letters, diaries, and journals persuaded me that education, whether formal or informal, had played a signal role in their lives. In writing about the schooling of these writers, I relied on my own research and on the very spare scholarship on the history of women’s education. Little existed beyond Anne Firor Scott’s pioneering articles on Emma Willard and the school that Willard had founded in Troy, New York. Barbara Miller Solomon’s long-awaited history of women’s higher education was still years away from publication. My research, Scott’s articles, and Thomas Woody’s two-volume History of Women’s Education in the United States, which had been published in 1929, led me to see that my subjects had benefited from the expansion in women’s educational opportunities that followed the American Revolution. That finding still stands. Indeed, the much more extensive research I have done for a book I am now completing strongly affirms that education played a transformative role in the lives of both women writers of fiction and their readers.⁵

In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, hundreds of female academies and seminaries welcomed women into the world of higher education. The writers explored in Private Woman, Public Stage were among them. Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Caroline Howard Gilman, born in 1789 and 1794 respectively, attended the early female academies, where they were taught reading, grammar, writing, history, arithmetic, and geography. Both were also instructed in the ornamental and decorative arts that had distinguished ladies in British America. The other writers, all of whom were born after 1800, had the opportunity to attend schools that offered curricula modeled on requirements of the male colleges. The value that Sedgwick’s and Gilman’s generation attached to instruction in social accomplishments gave way to an increasing emphasis on strictly academic study. In the 1820s, female academies began to include in their curricula natural philosophy, rhetoric, chemistry, logic, algebra, botany, astronomy, and moral philosophy. Latin and Greek typically were offered as electives. Three of antebellum America’s most prominent female seminaries were also founded in the 1820s. Established by Emma Willard at Troy, by Catharine Beecher at Hartford, and by Zilpah Grant at Ipswich, these schools opened their doors in 1821, 1823, and 1828 respectively. All three served as models for the hundreds of seminaries founded in the next three decades. What distinguished the seminaries, collegiate institutes, female colleges, and high schools founded in the decades between 1830 and 1860 was the deliberate inclusion of a collegiate curriculum that was designed to equal the course of study at the nation’s exclusively male institutions of higher education.⁶

Private Woman, Public Stage suggests that female academies and seminaries accorded secondary importance to the cultivation of women’s minds. My recent research has led me to revise my position on the role played by these institutions. I now see that the mission of these schools involved significantly more than instilling social and domestic concerns. Teachers and principals at these academies and seminaries were also committed to preparing their students for engagement with antebellum America’s public life. In teaching the ideals of liberal learning, the principles of logic and moral philosophy, and the arts of rhetoric and composition, academies and seminaries offered women the vocabularies and instilled in them the values of post-Revolutionary and antebellum civic culture. Indeed, by educating women for roles as reformers and teachers, as writers and editors, these schools realized their transformative potential. The schools and their teachers opened the future for young women to shape—a gift that enriched life’s possibilities. Yet, ultimately, it complicated those lives still more. For it left women to decide how they might arrive at distinguished usefulness, as Emma Willard told a student on the eve of her graduation from Troy Female Seminary.⁷

In presenting these writers as women who embraced a perspective that was private and familial and who, out of step with their culture’s past, wrote in public, Private Woman, Public Stage challenged the then-dominant interpretation of the conventions that antebellum women were expected to emulate. Barbara Welter’s widely reprinted The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860, originally published in the American Quarterly in 1966, had had an enormous impact on the closely affiliated fields of American women’s history and American women’s literature. The more familiar I became with the world of women writers and their contemporaries, the more I came to differ with Welter’s argument that antebellum women had been held hostage to the tenets of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Whereas Welter’s Womanhood was a seamless ideology with transparent directives, the fiction I was reading and the lives I was exploring reflected ambivalence, tension, and contradiction. Where Welter found docile compliance with the ideology’s prescriptions, I detected acts of subversion. I also became skeptical about the accuracy of Welter’s emphasis on the trait of submissiveness which denied women any power. Deference, which at least inscribed Welter’s True Womanhood with a measure of agency, struck me as closer to the mark.⁸

Other cultural historians and literary critics have advanced similar revisions of Welter’s stress on piety and purity. Lori D. Ginzberg and Barbara Leslie Epstein have discovered that piety did not always enforce women’s subordinate status and their confinement to the home but was also deployed in the service of empowering women. Ginzberg’s Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States has demonstrated that women made a gendered piety the basis for their claim to a commanding role in antebellum charitable and reform causes. Epstein has done the same in The Politics of Domesticity, which linked women, evangelism, and temperance. In revising the dictates of purity, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Nancy Cott have challenged the singularly restrictive meanings Welter ascribed to this tenet. Smith-Rosenberg’s widely reprinted Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Women: A Case Study of Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America explained how feminine purity was translated into a formidable weapon of righteousness that women wielded against male sexual license and the double standard. Antebellum women linked the same feminine purity to passionlessness that then could be used to secure familial and social power, as Cott showed in Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850.⁹

Private Woman, Public Stage was published on the cusp of the shift from an almost exclusive focus on women’s history to the now-familiar gender history. Cultural historians and literary critics who employed women as an analytical category mapped the geography of gender by emphasizing a socially constructed separate sphere, which they typically labeled domesticity. Taking my cue from the writers themselves, who divided the world into the household and all that lay beyond, I did the same. Indeed, the degree to which I relied on the explanatory power of separate spheres is obvious in the title I chose: Private Woman, Public Stage. I no longer posit the existence of such a sharp demarcation between public and private spheres; instead, I believe the boundaries are far more porous than the binary category allows. It seems especially important now to analyze the many dimensions of gender, both as a lived reality and as a symbolic representation. In Private Woman, Public Stage, I had already begun to dismantle the conventions that enclosed Welter’s domesticity by showing that my subjects traversed the familiar boundaries separating the private and the public in their lives and their fiction. Today I would go still further in conceptualizing the uses made of domesticity, both as a socially prescribed location and as a series of gendered attributes that codified the feminine.¹⁰

In these revisions of perspective, I have learned much from the vocabularies and theoretical strategies of gender history. What I had once labeled an ideology of domesticity is better understood as a discourse that was manifest in practices as well as in beliefs. Using Gail Bederman’s definition of discourse as a set of ideas and practices which, taken together, organize both the way a society defines certain truths about itself and the way it deploys social power, it is possible to interpret more expansively the domesticity that these writers articulated. Bederman’s operative premise that these ideas and practices carry with them multiple uses, inconsistencies, and contradictions is equally suggestive. Antebellum discursive practices contained both liberatory and regulatory potential. In Private Woman, Public Stage, I accorded more importance to the latter. Today, however, the liberating potential of this discourse strikes me as of equal significance. The force of conventions such as deference and dependence endures, but the permeability of the boundaries these writers and their readers negotiated, the emancipatory possibilities in the system of social markers and meanings they articulated, and the relative autonomy they achieved are just as apparent.¹¹

The meanings I attributed to the public also seem different from the distance of years. Broad consideration of women and the world beyond the home seems less important than a sharper focus on the public sphere that sociologist Jürgen Habermas has posited as a discursive space in which private citizens once gathered to reflect upon public issues. Similarly, the women writers’ divided selves, the duality of their existence as private women on a public stage, while crucial, was matched by an engagement with the nation’s civic culture that deserves greater emphasis. Not only does it illuminate these writers’ relationship to a public sphere situated between the family and the state, but it makes explicit their connection to post-Revolutionary women who claimed a role in the civic discourse of a newly independent United States. Building upon the model of the Republican Mother, these female descendants of British America’s elite took the opportunity to empower themselves in all of their relationships with males—not only as wives and mothers, but also as friends and companions. They deployed this expanded influence in settings that ranged from female-centered institutions such as tea tables and salons to presidential levees and capital balls. Using these sites to superintend the behavior of men, these women polished manners, enlarged sympathies, and aided in the cultivation of moral sense.¹²

They were succeeded in these responsibilities by antebellum women committed to the same ideals. Women educators, editors, reformers, and writers spoke not only to the importance of wives and mothers schooling their families in the dictates of virtue, but also to the larger role they expected women to play in the nation’s public life. All of them insisted that women’s voices should be heard, not so much because as citizens they had the same rights and responsibilities as men, but because as women they set a purer, higher, more excellent example, as Sarah Josepha Hale told readers of the Ladies’ Magazine in 1835. The writers of literary domesticity represented themselves and their heroines in similar fashion. When they decided to come out. . . before the world as Susan Warner described her pseudononymous appearance as the author of the Wide, Wide World, they claimed exemplary status. Likening themselves to preachers, they validated public careers on the basis of conventions that ascribed to wives and mothers responsibility for the family’s moral and spiritual state. In concert with Hale, who was editing antebellum America’s most popular periodical, they extended that familial role to guardianship of the nation’s character. They invested the characters in their fiction with the same transcendent morality, and they invited readers to model themselves on selfless heroines who dedicate themselves to redeeming less than virtuous men.¹³

Today I look upon the experiences of these writers and the representations they left us (not only in their fiction, but in their descriptions of themselves in letters, diaries, and journals) as equally important. I also see the experiences, or the felt realities of their lives, not so much as unmediated but instead as generated by and through a host of cultural forms. The position I now take owes much to what Louise Newman has characterized as the shared goal of women’s and gender history—articulating the history of interrelationships between ‘experience’ and ’representation’ of cultural forms. That interrelationship is apparent in Caroline Howard Gilman’s reaction to her initial appearance before the public. Gilman wove together the threads of historical experience and discursive representation in one striking image. The sixteen-year-old had not been told that a member of her family had submitted one of her poems for publication. When the poem appeared in a local newspaper, Gilman had been alarmed. She had felt as if I had been detected in a man’s apparel.¹⁴

Virtually all of the women writers I studied registered a similar sense of anxiety about the transgression of cultural norms. They faltered before investing themselves and their fiction with artistic authority—the novels that brought them literary fame they claimed as nothing more than my little books (Wilson), my simple tales (Terhune), my little enterprises (Gilman), and my humble literary labors (Sedgwick). These representations testify to the difficulty women writers had in envisioning themselves as creators of culture. It was easy enough to claim moral guardianship, a role with which women had already been identified. The mantle of lords of creation was an entirely different matter. Along with genius, men had reserved that accolade for themselves, and many balked at sharing this honor. Consider Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lament that America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women. Hawthorne’s damnation figured prominently in the making of the American literary canon. During much of the twentieth century, women and their writing were either ignored or, if acknowledged at all, consigned to the other. Of course, that other was the feminine, which literary critic Fred Lewis Pattee labeled as fervid, fevered, furious, fatuous, fertile, feeling, florid, furbelowed, fighting, [and] funny. No artistic authority and certainly no genius here. We have only to take a glance at the scholarship of the last three decades to see that Judith Fetterley’s resisting readers" have transformed the canon of Pattee and company. Nowhere is that transformation more apparent than in the scholarship on antebellum women writers.¹⁵

A host of cultural historians and literary critics have contributed to the critical recovery of these writers. Private Woman, Public Stage had its predecessor in Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870, the landmark study that Nina Baym published in 1978. By focusing on story and characterization, Baym identified an overplot in which a heroine left without resources struggles for survival and achieves an independence that she yields in marriage at the novel’s end. In a dazzling analysis of language and textual structure, Susan Harris went a step further, recovering the ideologically disruptive possibilities embedded in the fiction of these writers. Stories that closed with the heroine’s deference and dependence had a radical edge, Harris suggested in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels. The acts of subversion that I had glimpsed in apparently conservative texts surface in stories where exploratory themes of female independence, intellectual competence, and emotional complexity are situated between conventional beginnings and predictable endings. Harris’s multileveled interpretation provided for language and structure a corrective that reinforces what I now see as the liberatory potential of domesticity. Its many uses were expanded still further by Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism, which juxtaposes domesticity’s discourse against the possessive individualism that defined masculine selfhood for nineteenth-century Americans. More recently, a collection of essays edited by Karen Kilcup brings into conversation these traditionally opposed masculine and feminine traditions.¹⁶

Much of the debate about the merits of literary domesticity has centered on inquiries that ask What is sentimentality?, as June Howard posed the question in an illuminating essay on the contested meanings attributed to the cluster of words that have been used to mark all matters sentimental. Indeed, as literary critic Joanne Dobson has remarked, the term itself has been perhaps the most overworked, imprecise, misapplied, emotionally loaded, inadequately understood term in American literary classification. More is at stake here than might appear at first glance. The American literary canon has been built on politically freighted oppositions between popular and elite, ephemeral and classic, and female and male writing. What makes a novel subject to dismissal as popular, ephemeral, and female? The answer is plain: trafficking in the language of sentimentality.¹⁷

No charge was leveled more widely in the literary criticism focused on the writers who are the subject of Private Woman, Public Stage. Instead of taking the sentimental as a category for analysis, scholars tended to glorify or to disparage it, to insist upon either its alliance with or challenge to dominant ideology. In short, as Howard has remarked, they tended to be either ’for’ or ’against’ sentimentality, whatever its cultural form. Few, if any, literary critics have taken greater exception to literary sentimentality than Ann Douglas. In The Feminization of American Culture, Douglas insisted that the impact of women writers on nineteenth-century culture was as disabling as their fiction was banal. In feminizing the intellectually rigorous Calvinism that Douglas found compelling, they had betrayed their heritage with an avalanche of feeling. Douglas’s judgment was as damning as Hawthorne’s had been a century earlier: in Calvinism’s stead, these writers had crafted a culture that seemed bent on establishing a perpetual Mother’s Day. Although I did not share the antipathy toward either the writers or the fiction, I was uneasy with the label sentimental and especially with its connotations—its calling to mind maudlin, unthinking celebrants of a cloyingly intimate and blissful homelife, as I noted in the original preface. I adopted in its stead literary domesticity, which I believe speaks to a specific set of concerns without invoking the modernist disdain for anything that smacked of supposedly feminine emotion.¹⁸

In the years immediately following the publication of Private Woman, Public Stage, literary critics began to challenge Douglas’s formulation. Most notably, Jane Tompkins highlighted the cultural work accomplished by nineteenth-century women writers and their fiction. Placing antebellum women’s writing, including literary domesticity, in historical context, Tompkins argued that the novels offer[ed] powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating and proposing solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment. From the writer’s perspective, the problem was a possessive individualism that threatened affectional bonds. The solution resided in its opposite—human connection or affiliation on the planes of emotion, sympathy, nurturance, or like-minded moral or spiritual affiliation, as Joanne Dobson characterized the impulses with which sentiment and sentimentality had been aligned.¹⁹

More recently, literary critics and cultural historians have moved beyond this debate to a project that has generated an exceptionally rich scholarship in the last decade—mapping the making and remaking of the language of eighteenth-century sympathy and sensibility and its nineteenth-century formulation, sentiment and sentimentality. Contributors to Shirley Samuels’s influential collection of essays have looked at the culture of sentiment as a practice that, while generally designed to generate affiliation, had far more complicated consequences than many had previously assumed. Informed by what Samuels has identified as a double logic, the language of sentiment could now be seen as a force that both created and contested nineteenth-century culture. Authors of essays in the Nineteenth-Century Companion to American Women’s Writing have elaborated on the many uses made of sympathy and sentiment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Fredrika Teute’s essay on Margaret Bayard Smith is emblematic in this regard. Using as her point of departure the claim that sentiment served as one of the early republic’s foundational discourses, Teute highlights its alternating emphases upon individual liberation and social cohesion that led Bayard Smith to resist the constraints of domesticity, even as it encouraged her to practice wifely deference. In her oscillation between the countervalences of individual desire and familial obligation, Bayard Smith bears a close resemblance to the women who are the subjects of Private Woman, Public Stage.²⁰

In the years that I spent as a graduate student and as a newly minted Ph.D., I came to believe that it was essential to make women’s writing more readily available to general readers, scholars, and students. This was hardly an original insight. The recovery of nineteenth-century American women’s writing— texts as well as manuscript letters, diaries, and journals—has been one of the most striking developments in recent historical and literary scholarship. Toward that end, Rutgers University Press began an American Women Writers Series in 1986 under the editorial leadership of Judith Fetterley, Joanne Dobson, and Elaine Showalter. The series opened with Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, which was originally published in 1824. Seventeen more volumes were reissued in the next six years, each of which appeared with a critical introduction and selected bibliography. In this way, the fiction of Alice Cary, Maria Cummins, Rose Terry Cooke, Sara Parton, and E.D.E.N. Southworth, among others, entered the world of print after an absence of nearly a century. I participated in this project, by editing Hope Leslie, Sedgwick’s novel that offers today’s readers a revisionist history of the conflict between the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Puritans and the Pequots with whom they battled for land. I also edited The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journals of Catharine Maria Sedgwick. And I said yes to an inquiry from Michael Millman, the editor of the well-known Viking Portables, when he asked if I was interested in editing a volume of Margaret Fuller’s writings. I already knew about the Portable Emerson, Lincoln, Thoreau, Jefferson, Hemingway, Twain, and Fitzgerald. What about women other than Fuller, I asked. There was a long silence and then a halting reply: Dorothy Parker? I elected to do the Viking Portable on Fuller.

During the years in which Private Woman, Public Stage was being written and those immediately after its publication, literary critics asked me why a historian would take authors and their fiction as a subject. Many of the letters inquiring about my scholarship on women writers were sent to the Department of English at Dartmouth College. Today the question is no longer asked; the mail is delivered directly to the History Department. Why, one might ask? In no small measure, the answer resides in the interdisciplinary approach taken by scholars who have been engaged in the recovery and revision of nineteenth-century American women writers. Cultural historians and literary critics have traversed disciplinary boundaries, experimented with methodological strategies, and dismantled cultural hierarchies. The process of cross-fertilization has resulted in an academic variant of the cultural work that women writers performed in the nineteenth century. While they may not have sought to redefine the social order writ large, individuals traveling under the label of either historian or critic have challenged one of the academy’s most distinguishing features—its disciplinary compartmentalization of scholars. In book series, in conference proceedings, in journals, and in collections of essays, they have changed the face of nineteenth-century American history and American literature as they are taught in secondary schools, colleges, and universities. In its frame and in its analysis, Private Woman, Public Stage was originally, and is still, designed to contribute to that project.²¹

Mary Kelley

Lyme Center, New Hampshire

January 2002

Notes

In the preparation of this preface, Presidential Research Scholar Sarah Stokes and I have worked together so closely that she has become more a collaborator than a research assistant. Gail Vernazza, the History Department’s Administrative Assistant, has held it all together, making it possible for me simultaneously to chair the Department and pursue the research on which this essay is based. Jeanne Boydston, June Howard, and Katherine Monteiro attended to the preface with critical care that was matched by generous enthusiasm. These pages have been improved by the discerning and demanding eye of Ellen Fitzpatrick, the finest of wordsmiths. They benefited as well from the close and careful readings done by Judith Fetterley and Mary Beth Norton, the readers for the University of North Carolina Press. From the initial suggestion that Private Woman, Public Stage be reprinted to the conversations about this preface, Kate Torrey’s support has been crucial to the evolution of the project. Philip Pochoda has brought much more to this essay than he would be willing to acknowledge. Not least, I am grateful for his sustained and sustaining encouragement to take my ideas one step further.

1. Linda Kerber has recounted the years in which women’s history was developing as a field in her introduction to Toward An Intellectual History of Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1-19. My choice to focus on writers of fiction rather than women who were publishing in other genres was shaped by several factors. Perhaps most significantly, I was influenced by the popularity and the visibility that these writers had achieved in the literary marketplace. Since the publication of Private Woman, Public Stage, cultural historians and literary critics have recovered women writing in other genres. For one of the most notable examples, see Nina Baym’s American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

2. Because I decided not to include Alice Cary in the book, the total in Private Woman, Public Stage numbered twelve rather than thirteen.

3. American Literary Manuscripts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960). I also consulted the bibliographical notes appended to the biographies in Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).

4. Andrea Hinding, ed., Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1979). This survey, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Minnesota, received its original impetus from Clarke Chambers, Carl Degler, Janet Wilson James, Gerda Lerner, and Anne Firor Scott.

5. ‘Empire of Reason:’ The Making of Learned Women in Nineteenth-Century America, the manuscript I am now completing, takes as its subjects the transformative impact of educational opportunity, the fashioning of more expansive gender roles, and the unprecedented entry of women into public life.

6. See Anne Firor Scott, What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?, Journal of American History 65 (December 1978): 679-703; The Ever Widening Circle’: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822-1872, History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 3-27; and Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). The argument I am making here about female academies and seminaries is drawn from ‘Empire of Reason’: The Making of Learned Women in Nineteenth-Century America.

7. Autograph Album of Elizabeth C. Clemson, Manuscripts, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The alternative interpretation with which I have come to differ can be found in Christie Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

8. Barbara Welter, The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860, American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-74. Published two years after Welter’s article appeared, Aileen Kraditor’s widely read collection of documents identified the question of ‘separate spheres’ as central to the understanding of American feminism. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Nancy Cott, and Carl Degler relied on the ideas and institutions embodied in the concept of women’s sphere in studies that influenced much of the scholarship published in the 1970s and early 1980s. By the middle of the 1980s, the influence of separate spheres was beginning to wane. Published in 1985, Nancy Hewitt’s influential essay mapped the challenges to universal definitions of female character on which the influential true woman/separate spheres/woman’s culture triad had been based. See Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968); Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Degler, Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Hewitt, Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s, Social History 10 (October 1985): 299-321. More recently, Laura McCall has returned to Welter’s claim of submissiveness. In a content and textual analysis of 104 popular novels and stories that explodes submissiveness, she demonstrates that obedient and dependent women were not the ideal. Instead, McCall argues, the authors of this fiction denounced womanly self-abnegation, crafted female heroes, permitted open defiance, and portrayed overly-dependent women as unfortunate objects of pity. See ’Shall I Fetter Her Will?’ : Literary Americans Confront Feminine Submission, 1820-1860, Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 95-113.

9. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study of Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America, American Quarterly 23 (1971): 562-84; Nancy Cott, Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 2 (1978): 219-36.

10. Historiographical surveys of the literature that interrogates separate spheres ideology include Linda Kerber, Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History, Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9-39; Cathy N. Davidson, No More Separate Spheres!, American Literature 70 (September 1998): 443-63; and Dana D. Nelson, Women in Public: A Reexaminaton of Separate Spheres, in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing ed. Philip Gould and Dale Bauer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38-68.

11. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 24. Lora Romero takes a similar position, arguing that writers, both female and male, staked out a plurality of positions in their representations of antebellum domesticity. Instead of focusing exclusively on domination and resistance, we would do well, as she says, to attend to these local formulations, which themselves were continually shifting and taking on altered dimensions. See Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).

12. In the last fifteen years, many cultural historians and literary critics have looked for theoretical grounding to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a public sphere situated between the private family and the public state. In David S. Shields’s brilliant recovery of British America’s world of polite conversation and belles lettres, we have been introduced to a public sphere inhabited not only by men whose presence we might have anticipated but also by previously invisible women who were central to institutions of sociability. The scholarship of Shields and Fredrika J. Teute carries the analysis of sociability into the post-Revolutionary decades. Perhaps most striking, they demonstrate sociability’s role in transforming women’s relationship to the public sphere. Teute, Jan Lewis, and Catherine Allgor recover the institutions of sociability that played a key role in the nation’s capital during the administrations of Washington, Adams, and Madison. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Habermas, The Public Sphere: An Encyclopaedia Article (1964) New German Critique 1 (Fall 1974): 49-55; Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Shields and Teute, The Republican Court and the Historiography of the Women’s Domain in the Public Sphere, paper presented at the sixteenth annual meeting of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, Boston, Mass., 15 July 1994; Teute, Roman Matron on the Banks of Tiber Creek: Margaret Bayard Smith and the Politization of Spheres in the Nation’s Capital, in A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic ed. Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 89-121; Lewis, Politics and the Ambivalence of the Private Sphere: Women in Early Washington, D.C., in Kennon, A Republic for the Ages, 122-151; and Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

13. Sarah Josepha Hale, The End and Aim of the Present System of Female Education, Ladies Magazine (February 1835): 65; Susan Warner to My Dear Sir, 1 April 1851, Simon Gratz Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. On the complementary role played by women editors, see Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). The revised and expanded definition of the public sphere that I am using here owes much to the feminist challenges posed by Dena Goodman, Mary P. Ryan, Nancy Fraser, and Carol Lasser. See Goodman, Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime, History and Theory 31 (1992): 1-20; Ryan, Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America, in Habermas and the Public Sphere ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 259-88; Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in Calhoun, Habermas, 109-42; Lasser, Beyond Separate Spheres: The Power of Public Opinion, Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 115–23.

14. As Louise Newman has suggested, the merger of these practices requires crossing and recrossing boundaries in which scholars have a major investment in order to maintain the terms of both practices and work toward translating the insights of each into the language and framework of the other. See Newman, Critical Theory and the History of Women: What’s at Stake in Deconstructing Women’s History, Journal of Women’s History 3 (Winter 1991): 59; and Caroline Howard Gilman, Autobiographical sketch in The Female Prose Writers of America ed. John S. Hart (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler and Co., 1852), 55.

15. Nathaniel Hawthorne to William Ticknor, 19 January 1855, Letters of Hawthorne to William Ticknor 1851-1864 (Newark, N.J.: Carteret Book Club, 1910), 1: 75; Fred Lewis Pattee, The Feminine Fifties (New York: Appleton Century, Inc.), 3. The reference to resisting readers comes from Judith Fetterley’s now-classic The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

16. For a superb commentary on recent directions taken in the scholarship on nineteenth-century American women writers, see Sharon M. Harris, ’a new era in female history’: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers, in American Literature (forthcoming, Fall 2002). See also Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Susan K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining the Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Karen L. Kilcup, Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999).

17. June Howard, What Is Sentimentality?, American Literary History (Spring 1999): 63-81; Joanne Dobson, ’The American Renaissance Reenvisioned," in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 169. For fuller elaborations of the arguments presented in these essays, see Howard, Publishing the Family (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 213-56; and Dobson, Reclaiming Sentimental Literature, American Literature 69 (1997): 263-88. In her more recent emendation, Howard tracks the shifting meanings of sentimentality as Americans deployed the concept from the late eighteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. Perhaps most incisively, she engages the current debates, suggesting why sympathy and sentiment have had such an enduring purchase.

18. Howard, What Is Sentimentality?, 63; Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977), 6. Douglas was hardly alone. Others who shared her disdain ranged from leading literary critics Herbert Ross Brown to Henry Nash Smith. See Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1940); and Smith, The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story, Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (1974): 47-70. The degree to which literary critics had resisted acknowledging that the renaissance identified by Dobson merited study, much less inclusion in the canon, is placed in sharp relief by Nina Baym’s Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors, American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-40. The phrase literary domesticity was taken from Mary Virginia Terhune, who spoke for all of these writers in declaring it is my ambition to relieve literary domesticity from the odium that rests upon it. See the biographical sketch of Terhune in Kate Sanborn, Our Famous Women (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington and Co., 1886), 628.

19. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi; Dobson, The American Renaissance Reenvisioned, 170. The editors of differences dedicated the 1999/2000 issue to challenging the premises that informed The Feminization of American Culture. See especially Philip Gould’s introduction with its shrewd observations on the linkages between Douglas’s feminization and the ideas of her mentor, Perry Miller. An equally significant challenge has been mounted in Deborah Barker’s pathbreaking articulation of a nineteenth-century aesthetics that women writers grounded in the emotional and material dimensions of domesticity. See differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Fall 1999/2000); and Barker, Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: Portraits of the Woman Artist (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2000).

20. Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Dale Bauer and Philip Gould, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. 203-20. See also Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters; Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). In a recent essay in which she reviews books ranging from Jocyelyn Moody’s Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001) to Lori Merish’s Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), Sharon Harris highlights the significance that cultural historians and literary critics continue to ascribe to the constellation of ideas and practices that we designate sentimental. See Harris, ‘a new era in female history.’ Recent scholarship that takes us beyond the familiar linkage between women and the sentimental to show that men participated in a variety of sentimental discourses includes Julie K. Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

21. Simultaneous with the establishment of the Rutgers American Writers Series, Martha Ackmann, Karen Dandurand, and Joanne Dobson founded Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, which began the recovery and reassessment of women writers as important contributors to nineteenth-century culture. Collections of women’s writings that expand the canon commenced with Judith Fetterley’s influential Provisions: A Reader from Nineteenth-Century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Others include Lucy M. Freibert and Barbara A. White, eds., Hidden Hands: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1790-1870 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985); and Karen Kilcup, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers (London: Blackwell, 1997). See also Denise D. Knight, ed., Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997).

Part I

PECULIAR CIRCUMSTANCES

1

The Fanny Fern

A letter from a freight conductor in the 6 September 1873 issue of the New York Ledger, a weekly paper, reported the sighting a month before of a railroad parlor car pulling into Cleveland’s Union Depot. There was nothing unusual about seeing a railroad car in the American countryside, which signified in itself that the economic and physical face of the land had been transformed in a few decades. But the freight conductor’s parlor car indicated other changes in America, in the nation’s social and cultural fabric. This was no ordinary railroad car. Rather, this was a magnificent parlor car and, wrote the conductor, it thrilled me as I read the name it bore, fanny fern, encircled by a golden wreath. As unlikely as the name was, even more strange was the fact that the railroad car heralded a writer, and a female writer at that. Oddly enough, Fanny Fern had died not long before, and there yet remained three months until the first anniversary of her death. Whether or not the conductor was surprised by this apparently unexplained appearance, he did not say. But he did write that 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 long as memory lasts.¹ It is possible that the parlor car was touring the country not as a memorial to Fanny Fern but in celebration of her birth, which had been in July 1811, and had only just arrived in Cleveland when the freight conductor saw it. In any case, it was appropriate that he wrote to the New York Ledger, for the Ledger had issued most of Fanny Fern’s prose for almost two decades, and it was the Ledgers editor and proprietor, Robert Bonner, who had promoted Fanny Fern from an early stage in her literary career.

Any history of American business inventiveness, commercial gimmickery, or just plain corn would do well to include the story of Bonner, who knew much more about celebrating life than mourning death. A Scotch-Irish immigrant who had come to this country in 1839 at the age of fifteen, the ambitious Robert Bonner quickly learned everything he could about journalism and publishing. Beginning with a position as a printer’s devil for the Hartford Courant, Bonner moved from there to the American Republican, where he worked as an assistant foreman and proofreader, and thence to the New York Evening Mirror. It was at the Mirror that Bonner’s apprenticeship blossomed into a career, as he filled the roles of printer, subeditor, and writer. By 1851, when he was twenty-seven, he had also accumulated the money to purchase the Merchant’s Ledger, a weekly business sheet begun in 1846. Made up of four pages measuring twenty-two by fourteen inches, with five columns to the page, the Merchant’s Ledger printed a little news, classified advertisements, and financial and business information. Only a small portion of its space was devoted to stories and poetry for the family.²

After Bonner’s purchase the sheet was never the same. By 1855 he claimed to have increased the number of copies sold twenty times. But Bonner’s pioneering of America’s first successful family story paper had only just begun. Only a year later the Ledger reached a circulation of 180,000, the highest of the time, and eventually climbed to 350,000. When Bonner retired in 1887 and transferred the operation of the Ledger to his three sons, it was estimated that he handed them property valued at $2 million, some $1 million in the Ledger alone, for which he had originally paid $500.³

Bonner accomplished his remarkable feat through basic changes in the Ledger’s content and extensive advertising of his paper. New York was substituted for Merchant’s in the title in 1855, and business columns and advertising space were gradually made less prominent, until by 1856 the paper was filled almost exclusively with fictional serials, stories, sketches, poetry, editorials, correspondence, and miscellaneous items. Supposedly guided by the policy of printing nothing that the most pious old lady in a Presbyterian church would find objectionable, Bonner proclaimed that his paper was meant for the family and was neither sectarian nor political. Abolitionist and even Democrat were forbidden words. His ploy was to recruit the services of famous writers by paying them liberally. Eventually included in his entourage were William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry Ward Beecher, George Bancroft, James Parton, and, with an eye to a female audience, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Virginia Terhune, and E.D.E.N. Southworth. Bonner had little difficulty recruiting writers when he paid such munificent sums as the $30,000 advanced to Beecher for his novel Norwood or the $3,000 paid Longfellow for a single poem. Five thousand was presented to Dickens for Hunted Down, the only story the novelist wrote for an American publication, and another $5,000 was paid to Tennyson, again for a single poem.⁴

From the outset Bonner’s stock-in-trade was advertising. One day he took a full page in the New York Tribune, and in one week he bought so much advertising space in the New York Herald that the size of the paper was doubled. The promotional sums spent were phenomenal for the period. In one particular year Bonner spent $100,000. Twenty-five thousand was lavished on Southworth’s The Island Princess, a novel that ran serially in the Ledger’s columns before it was reprinted in book form as The Lady of the Isle. It pays to advertise when you’ve got a good thing and want people to know it, said Bonner upon his retirement. One way he made people know it was to have printed on the page of a newspaper just a few lines heralding an author’s story, stating that the complete tale could be found in the Ledger’s pages. He is credited as well with being the first to resort to the stratagem of printing a few chapters of a tale in another publication, only to end it suddenly with the information that an interested reader would have to buy the latest issue of the Ledger in order to complete the adventure.⁵

Bonner’s policy of combining famous writers with innovative advertising was probably never employed more ingeniously than with Fanny Fern. Fanny Fern was the pseudonym of Sara Parton, and it was a pen name already known to thousands of American readers by the time Bonner obtained her services. Short sketches by Parton had appeared in many of the nation’s newspapers in the early 1850s, and in 1854 the house of Derby and Miller had published her first volume of sketches, titled Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio. In less than a year from the date of publication over 80,000 copies were sold. A second series of sketches followed shortly after, along with a juvenile volume whose title, Little Fern Leaves for Fanny’s Little Friends, once more displayed Parton’s delight in alliteration. The combined sale of the latter two volumes was 62,000.⁶

Bonner was not the first to conduct a huge campaign to promote Parton’s work. The same year that the volumes of sketches addressed to adults and children appeared, Parton signed a contract with Mason Brothers for her first novel, Ruth Hall. Noteworthy among the clauses was the firm’s agreement to use extraordinary exertions in publicizing the novel with the hope that it might exceed the sale of any previous work. While Mason Brothers did not succeed in reaching that goal with their three-stage campaign, it cannot be said that their venture was a failure: Ruth Hall sold more than 50,000 copies within eight months. Mounted toward the end of 1854, stage one concentrated upon prepublication publicity announcing the forthcoming appearance of the novel and predicting great success for it. Utilizing favorable comments from critics, stage two involved repeated claims that the forecast was proving truer than expected. And in stage three the publisher ran six daily advertisements in February 1855 proclaiming the most successful american book: ruth hall. The same technique was employed again in April of that year.⁷

Thus when Bonner recruited Parton for the Ledger in 1855 he was, in typically shrewd fashion, benefiting from an already successful show. But it would not have been in character for Bonner merely to climb aboard Parton’s bandwagon for the ride. After all, he had a good thing and he wanted people to know it. Accordingly, the 19 May 1855 issue of the Ledger printed an editorial with banner headlines: great attraction: New Story for the Ledger, by fanny fern: Great Plans for the Future! It had been four years, began the editorial, since the Ledger had come under new management, four years since it had stated in its very first issue the determination to devote the strength and vigor of the morning of our manhood to the upbuilding and advancement of the ledger. No one could doubt, it stated proudly, recalling the increase in circulation already achieved, that that effort had proved to be eminently successful? But if others were satisfied with the Ledger’s progress, we confess, we are not. The editorial continued, We are ambitious—perhaps a little too much so—and have an ardent desire to extend our influence, to become the weekly paper with the highest circulation in the United States. The paper was already cheap, it noted, selling for three cents a copy and one dollar a year, so that the poor as well as the wealthy, can buy it.

The intention was to provide a great feature by combining the highest order of attraction and excellence with our cheapness, and in that way make a paper that would be universally sought for and read. Efforts had already been made in that regard through the initiation of correspondence with some of America’s most prominent writers in order to recruit them for the Ledger without any regard to price! And now, it announced, with trumpets blaring and banners waving, "the most popular authoress in this or in any other country—fanny fern, is now engaged in writing a Tale for the Ledger." In order to bring the woman writer to the Ledger, we have to pay by far the highest price that has ever been paid by any newspaper publisher to any author. The price, of course, went unmentioned; said the editorial, if we mentioned the amount, we presume some people would consider us ’half-cracked’ for paying such an enormous price to any author. But that was no matter, for "we know that something cannot be obtained for nothing; and that a Good Article is worth a Good Price." Thus was stated what was probably Bonner’s own personal logo as well as his policy for the Ledger.

Appearing on the first page under the leadline Great Original Tale by Fanny Fern, the serial began running in the Ledger in the 9 June 1855 issue. It was titled Fanny Ford: A Story of Everyday Life, and, said the Ledger, it was Written expressly for the New-York Ledger, at a greater expense than was ever before incurred by a newspaper publisher, and will not be issued as a book. Sara Parton was paid $1,000 for the story. In 1856 she began writing a column exclusively for the Ledger and continued doing so until her death in 1872.⁸

Robert Bonner gave Parton’s literary bandwagon his own vigorous push in 1855. In 1873 the freight conductor spotted the parlor car Fanny Fern. However, neither Parton’s career nor the Fanny Fern would have rolled had the nation and the economy not experienced massive growth and expansion since 1820. Those changes made possible and provided the structure for the creation of a national publishing industry. Two of the more striking results were the commercialization and democratization of literature. In fact, literary economics had roughly paralleled the economic development of the nation. In a sense the appearance of the railroad parlor car symbolized those developments. Moreover, the Fanny Fern in its own right announced to the nation that the literary domestics, who believed in the dictum that woman’s place was in the home as wife and mother, nevertheless had stepped into a public arena traditionally ruled by men and had achieved a distinctive measure of success there.

By the time that the literary domestics had exited the public stage they knew they had been noticed. Starting with Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s first few efforts in the 1820s, followed by Caroline Howard Gilman and Caroline Lee Hentz in the 1830s, Maria McIntosh, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the 1840s, and Maria Cummins, Mary Jane Holmes, Sara Parton, Mary Virginia Terhune, Susan Warner, and Augusta Evans Wilson in the 1850s, these twelve, who were among the most commercially successful of the literary domestics, came to dominate a substantial literary marketplace.

The degree of the literary domestics’ popularity was unique and staggering.