[In the following excerpt, Tonkovich explores the influence of Fanny Fern's home life, education, and the community on her literary efforts. Tonkovich also argues that Fern never considered writing and domesticity as mutually exclusive.]

… Grata Sara(h) Payson Willis Eldredge Farrington Parton (who also used the pseudonyms “Tabitha,” “Olivia,” and “Fanny Fern”) is a figure whose multiplicity of names marks the difficulty of positing a stable (auto)biographical subject.¹ A writer who capitalized on the ambiguity of her identity, Fern demonstrates how the relation of writing women to home, school, and community changed as formal education for women became more generally available. As fifth child and third daughter in her family, Sara Willis was distanced from her father's scrutiny and patronage; moreover, from a very early age she boarded away from her family in schools headed by several of New England's most illustrious pioneer educators of women. These schools, in turn, mediated her connection with a wide community of readers and writers and facilitated her abilities at self-fashioning in various genres—including autobiography, fiction, personal essays, and periodical journalism.

In the Willis family, as in the Beechers, Fullers, and Buells [the homes of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, and Margaret Fuller], literate practices were central to the family's identity. Nathaniel Willis's father had edited Boston's Independent Chronicle, a Whig newspaper, during the Revolution. Although Willis himself had not received a college degree, he daily associated with literate and discerning fellow citizens. A journalist and printer, he edited the Eastern Argus and founded two other papers—the Recorder, the first religious newspaper in the United States, and the Youth's Companion, the first newspaper for juveniles (McGinnis 3). Almost no biographical information is available about Hannah Parker, although she apparently had some degree of advanced literacy. Like the Beechers, the Willis family unit often expanded to include visitors and boarders. As Nathaniel Willis and his wife were extremely devout, their home was a crossroads for itinerant clergymen. According to James Parton, Fern's third husband, biographer, and memoirist, Fern's recollections of her “grandfather's house” in her sketch “The Prophet's Chamber” are autobiographical and refer to “her father's” house. Of this home, Fern says that it “was to all intents and purposes a ministerial tavern;—lacking the sign … almost every steamboat, stage and railroad car brought … a visitor. They dropped their carpet-bags in the hall with the most perfect certainty of a welcome” (“Memoir” 28).

Biographers agree that the Willis children absorbed much of the elevated atmosphere of political, journalistic, and theological debate that surrounded them. As James Parton's memoir of his wife's childhood establishes, they “learned, at a very early age, to employ, in their familiar letters, the phraseology which used to abound in religious newspapers and biographies” (26). This ventriloquized religious discourse had its outlet in the papers Nathaniel Willis published, for which his daughter Sara (and presumably her other siblings, as well) read proof and wrote fillers, and in which she eventually published essays.

Like the Beechers, many of the nine Willis children followed their father's occupation. As Parton recalled, “Facility in composition was too common among them to be remarked, and they took to pen and ink as to a native element. They were brought up among newspapers and books” (“Memoir” 32). Sara Willis and three of her siblings became professional journalists. Her elder brother Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular poet and model for Fern's infamous Apollo Hyacinth and his later reincarnation, Hyacinth Ellet, also wrote as a foreign correspondent for the New York Mirror, cofounded and edited the New York Home Journal, and edited the Atlantic Monthly. An elder sister, Julia Dean Willis, became a linguist, teacher, and correspondent for the Home Journal; and a younger brother, Richard Storrs Willis, a composer and poet, edited the New York Musical World and Times.

Beyond these documented facts, it is difficult to establish biographical “truth” for Sara Willis, since Fanny Fern's phenomenally popular novel Ruth Hall, widely accepted as a roman à clef, determined (and continues to determine) the structure of subsequent biographical interpretations. Ruth Hall insist that its heroine is a self-made woman writer who succeeded without paternal assistance and in spite of active opposition from her already notorious elder brother. Other sketches purporting to be autobiographical emphasize her mother's literary promise, linking motherhood with writing as well as with reading. Of her mother, Fern wrote to a juvenile readership: “Had [her] time not been so constantly engrossed by a fast-increasing family, … I am confident she would have distinguished herself. Her hurried letters, written with one foot upon the cradle, give ample evidence of this. She talked poetry unconsciously! The many gifted men to whom her hospitality was extended, and who were her warm personal friends, know this” (New 12-13).

In its conflation of images of writing with child care, the similarity of this representation to Fuller's schoolmates' estimation of her early intellectual gifts is striking. Although Fern is the only one of these four women actually to portray her mother as a writer, she also immediately brings her mother's genius under a masculine supervisory gaze that approves even incipient writing by women as long as maternal duties are not slighted. The balance of Fern's writing on behalf of women's authorship does not stray from this pattern. She insists that women may write and that it does not detract from their maternal functions. Ruth Hall demonstrates, Hale-fashion, that a woman may turn to writing as the highest expression of maternal duty in the support of her fatherless children. Columns such as “A Practical Blue Stocking” guarantee that the labor of writing will never interfere with domestic duty, since the order and regularity engendered by writing can only enhance the practice of good housekeeping. Like good prose, “windows [are] transparently clean”; like columns of print, “the hearth-rug [is] longitudinally and mathematically laid down; the pictures hung ‘plumb’ upon the wall.” Even in other columns, which make the reverse argument, showing that the literary text erases its domestic context, domestic containment and masculine supervision are still at issue. In “Writing Under Difficulties,” Fern asserts: “I see parentheses in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Jane Eyre and Shirley, where the authors stated, that here they stopped to wash the ink spots from their fingers: or to make bread or put kindling in the oven preparatory to it, while the celestial spark stood in abeyance. Sometimes ‘stopped to wash baby’ might have been inserted on the margin opposite some interrupted pathetic passage” (Ledger 8 May 1869). Although writing and domesticity mutually efface each other, they are for Fern inseparable. Women writers cannot be separated from their maternal function; that maternal function, she emphasizes, differentiates their practice of literacy from men's.

Fern echoes, as well, the association of women with reading aloud that is so central to Beecher's, Hale's, and Fuller's childhood reminiscences. However, she moves it from home to school, replacing mother with teacher. Nor should this transformation come as a surprise in an autobiography structured as a progression from a mother-centered childhood to a youth spent in female seminaries. “When I Was Young,” an essay written long after common school instruction routinely taught writing to girls, fictionalizes school “as it used to be,” before a standard course of study replaced embroidery with writing:

in my school-days proper attention was given to rivers, bays, capes, islands, and cities in the forenoon—interspersed with, “I love, thou lovest, he, she, or it loves;” then, at the child's hungry hour—(twelve)—were dismissed to roast beef and apple dumplings. At three we marched back with a comfortable dinner under our aprons—with cool heads, rosy cheeks, and a thimble in our pockets; and never a book did we see all the blessed afternoon. I see her—the schoolma’am … with her benevolent face, and ample bosom—your flat-chested woman never should keep school, she has no room for the milk of human kindness; … when we were all seated, she drew from her pocket some interesting book and read it aloud to us—not disdaining to laugh at the funny places, and allowing us to do the same—hearing, well pleased, all our childish remarks, and answering patiently all our questions concerning the story, or travels, or poetry she was reading, while our willing fingers grew still more nimble; and every child uttered an involuntary “Oh!” when the sun slanted into the west window, telling us that afternoon school was over.

Ah, those were the days! (New 283-84)

In this passage the mother/teacher presides over a rosy prelapsarian and feminine world where even masculine pursuits such as conjugating Latin verbs are conducted in the mother tongue. In this world, desire is satiated by ample and timely nourishment. The nourishment is both literal—the roast beef and apple dumplings, dispensed presumably by nurturing mothers (and cooked by competent servants)—and, more notably, figurative, provided by the “ample-bosomed” schoolmistress. Afternoon school is the site of feminine community. The book, birthed from the teacher's womblike pocket, is a natural part of the woman-teacher. She stops for interruptions, resisting the relentless onward pressure of formal instruction in reading and writing. This passage stands in stark contrast to Margaret Fuller's recollection of how her father's rigor interrupted her childhood development. As well, it marks an implicit contrast to the strictly-disciplined public schools, now under the direction of writing-masters. Here every child is included as a willing participant in the reading and schooling experience. On the simplest level sewing and reading are compatible and appropriately feminine activities. The girls can sew while listening to what is read to them. If, however, one reads this text emphasizing the freedom extended the children to ask questions, the phrase “our willing fingers grew more nimble” suggests that engagement with the text, when mediated by womanly intuition, results in both increased production and enhanced intellectual engagement. If we read the girls' sewing as a metaphorical writing, the scene figures a utopia wherein women both read and write, sew and think, question and consume texts in an enclosed world safe from masculine intrusion, and the motherly schoolteacher becomes yet another embodiment of Ellen Kilshaw and Mary Foote.

Fanny Fern's autobiographical representation, then, places women at the center of her childhood education, as ideal readers, teachers, and writers. Unlike her peers, however, she says nothing of her father, brothers, or husband. Only in a fictional text, which has been taken for autobiographical fact, do these figures directly enter. The claims that Ruth Hall's brothers and father did nothing to advance her literary career are undoubtedly Fanny Fern's greatest notoriety and are generally taken as the biographical facts of Sara Willis's life. Other texts suggest, however, that Sara Willis's father and brothers held an important place in her literary training. Her home training as compositor, editor, and feature writer certainly enabled her start as a writer, as she implies in a column addressed “To Literary Aspirants.” Although the column is intended to emphasize the difficulty of beginning a literary career, it establishes, as well, the importance of her early entitlements: “Many a weary tramp I had; much pride I put in my pocket, and few pennies, even with the advantage of a good education and a properly prepared ms. and the initiation of ‘reading proof’—for my father, who was an editor, when I was not more than twelve years old—before I succeeded” (Ledger 28 Mar. 1868). Like Beecher, Willis/Hall/Fern benefited from family name and connections. James Parton remarks that N. P. Willis's “rising fame as a poet made his sister Sara, at the various schools that she attended, a person of note from the beginning” (“Memoir” 35). (Admittedly, this passage also suggests a difficult sibling rivalry.) Nor is it commonly noted that the publicity resulting from Fern's obvious caricature of N. P. Willis in Ruth Hall accomplished the same ends that his promotion of her would have effected.

It is difficult to determine whether any of Fern's encounters with institutional education were as rosy as the dame school experience recounted above. It is clear, however, that as the child of a “father and mother [who] shared the universal ambition of New England parents to give their children the best advantages of education” (Parton, “Memoir” 32), she enjoyed the broadest exposure to the spectrum of educational experiences available to a young girl of her generation. Like Lyman Beecher and Timothy Fuller, Nathaniel Willis was the primary agent in moving his daughter out of the home circle and into the more public world of formal women's education. Concerned that she lacked an appropriately feminine piety, he placed her in a series of schools whose listing encapsulates the historical development of the women's seminary: in early childhood, she was enrolled in two Boston grammar schools, the first for girls and the second coeducational; at age eleven she entered the Reverend Joseph Emerson's Ladies Seminary in Saugus, Massachusetts; in her midteens, she spent several years at the Adams Female Academy in Derry, New Hampshire, headed by Zilpah Polly Grant and Mary Lyon; finally she transferred to Catharine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary in 1828. This succession of schools all failed to develop in Sara Willis the sanctity her parents had hoped for.

Sara Willis's years at Hartford Female Seminary, which she attended from May 1828 through April 1831, demonstrate how Catharine Beecher had adapted her educational methods from those of Litchfield Female Academy and show how Willis's separation from her family and her exposure to a series of strong women engaged in institutional, theological, and educational revision and administration produced in this woman writer an exquisite and finely honed sense of a mobile identity, able to assume whatever textual manifestation the rhetorical situation demanded.

When Zilpah Grant left the Adams Academy in 1828 to found Ipswich Female Seminary, Sara Willis returned home briefly while her father looked for another school that would continue the Adams emphasis on moral rectitude. The Willis family's minister, Edward Beecher, recommended that Sara be educated under the supervision of “Miss Catharine Beecher, whose orthodoxy combined with a practical application in domestic life, was unexceptionable. Sara was, therefore, enrolled in The Ladies' Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut, where Miss Beecher presided as headmistress, assisted by Miss Harriet Beecher as pupil-teacher” (Adams 4).

At Hartford Female Seminary, Catharine Beecher, a product of the self-reporting system of Litchfield Female Academy and a devotee of Zilpah Grant's preceptorship model, sought to duplicate both those methods, possibly even in a more intense manner. Like Sarah Pierce's students, the young women who attended Hartford Female Seminary boarded with local families or lived at home. However, their boarding-out was closely monitored by the school. Beecher ensured that her teachers lived in the same boardinghouses as her students; she charged them to supervise students after school hours and outside school spaces. Thus Hartford Female Seminary and its attendant facilities functioned as a family writ large: the students were children; teachers assumed the function of mothers; and the redoubtable Miss Beecher assumed the position of father/administrator.

Within the school family, each teacher was personally responsible to monitor the behavior of specific students. Catharine Beecher herself supervised Sara Willis, reporting to her parents on every aspect of her behavior, from expenditures on a “Spring bonnet” and “corsettes” to the state of her soul (27 May 1829; Sophia Smith Collection). Beecher apparently had as little success inculcating piety in the high-spirited Sara as did her predecessors. Fern recalled Hartford Female Seminary as a place where she was sent for “algebra and safe-keeping, both of which I hated” (Caper-Sauce 108), while Catharine Beecher's report to the Willis parents concluded: “I do not feel much confidence in Sarah's piety but I do think that religious influence has greatly improved her character … tho’ her faults are not all eradicated, & tho’ I still fear the world has the first place, yet I think religion occupies much of her thoughts. She now rooms alone, & has much time for reading & reflection” (27 May 1829; Sophia Smith Collection).

While Sara Willis might have chafed at Hartford Female Seminary's regimen she never hesitated to assert that, while the school's formal writing instruction may have caused classmates despair, for her “‘Composition day’ … was only a delight” (Ledger 15 July 1871). The Beecher method of instruction, under which she thrived, included “Latin and English compositions—versified translations from Virgil's Eclogues and Ovid's Metamorphoses—[forms which] astonished those who had not been in the habit of expecting such things in a female school” (Stowe, “Catharine” 87). At such exercises, Fern apparently excelled. Among the “various methods” of teaching the composition—including oral declamation, vocabulary building, prescriptive stylistics, outlining, abstracting, and analysis (1831 Catalog 14)—parody or imitation of others' texts stands out as an exercise Sara Willis must have excelled in. In fact, the only one of her surviving compositions is a parody, not of a “classical” writer but of her own headmistress. Entitled “Suggestions on Arithmetic,” it invokes both Catharine Beecher's efforts to revise textbooks used by the seminary and her Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education, Presented to the Trustees, published the year after Willis entered the seminary. Its irreverent approach to seminary pieties accurately foreshadows the style and tone of Fanny Fern's columns.

Like Beecher, Fuller, and Hale, Sara Willis was also introduced as a writer at a comparatively early age to a larger community—parents, friends, trustees, local businessmen, newspaper publishers—who were occasionally invited to observe Hartford Female Seminary's activities. At terms' end, outsiders were invited to witness the examinations and the following “Exhibition, at which time a gentleman [would] read selections from the compositions of the pupils” (1831 Catalog 20). Less formal occasions brought the students' social skills under similar scrutiny, as Catharine Beecher arranged “weekly levees at which gentlemen were present” as well as local celebrities the likes of “Mrs. Sigourney.” The purpose of these socials, according to Willis's granddaughter, was to prepare the “young ladies to enter society” (Ethel Parton, “Fanny Fern, An Informal Biography,” 64; Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College). One of the two student newspapers produced at the seminary, the Levee Gazette, may have been intended to circulate to seminary friends and patrons at these gatherings.²

Seminary students were charged with sustaining the illusion of equitable interchange between community and seminary. If Willis's memoirs are to be believed, this was not always a duty they embraced enthusiastically. “Suggestions on Arithmetic,” for example, includes a scene in which the narrator, whose “overseers” fear she is “growing pale and thin from too close application” to her mathematics, is “dragged perforce into what they styled a levée,” where she spends the evening in the company of various “squaretoed” gentlemen, “the question, ‘Have you formed a favorable opinion of Hartford?’ having been answered, as well as the rest of the levée catechism, in monosyllables” (Parton, “Memoir” 40).

Despite this rather laconic account, biographers of Fanny Fern have identified these exhibitions and socials as arenas in which the young Sara Willis's writings encountered a broader readership. The infamous “Suggestions,” for example, was read at the end-of-term Exhibition in 1829. Biographers Ethel Parton and Joyce Warren both repeat the story that at the levées Willis met the editor of the local newspaper. Significantly, Ethel Parton begins her account of this relationship by emphasizing that Sara Willis was “first noticed as a sister of the poet, N. P. Willis,” but that she quickly became “a personality in her own right. Her sayings were quoted in social circles, her compositions copied and passed from hand to hand, paragraphs from them published in a leading local newspaper. The editor had made her acquaintance at a levee. Sometimes, wanting to fill a too-short column or sprinkle in a bit of spice, he came direct to the school, to ask for Miss Willis's latest. When she had nothing available he is known to have sat beside her in the school-room with paper and pencil at one desk, while she at the next one dictated as fast as he could write” (“Informal” 70).

That three of these writers may have been brought into publication through socializing with editors at literary groups may be coincidental; but the frequency with which the story appears suggests that it may be as much a trope as biographical fact, especially in the account of Willis dictating bon mots to the editor of a Hartford newspaper. The account carefully maintains a gender coding that seems to belie the facts: Willis was a skillful writer and editor as well as talker. Nevertheless, in Ethel Parton's telling of the anecdote, the woman talks and the man writes. When she writes, he edits, choosing “paragraphs” from them to add “spice” to his publication.

In establishing the usefulness of these levées to Fern's later success as a writer, scholars have given less attention to how such occasions served to further Beecher's career. Always aware that her projects would best succeed if she could claim broad bases of support, Beecher was careful to include parents, friends of students, and town fathers who were potential donors. These social occasions served to demonstrate to a masculine scrutiny that that gender-specific education was useful, circumspect, and deferential. For example, in the 1831 Catalog, Beecher concluded her paragraph describing the Annual Exhibitions in this fashion: “On these occasions, at first, the audience was small and select. But as the popularity of the school increased, the assembly increased, until it has become a question with many friends of the institution, whether these occasions will not be better dispensed with entirely, as involving too great publicity for those whose sphere is retirement. Such questions are best settled by the judgment of the judicious and refined in the vicinity, who can best learn all the circumstances of the case” (20). Characteristically, Beecher claims no responsibility for the schools' increasing “popularity,” nor does she align herself with those “friends of the institution” who would cancel the Exhibitions. Their concerns are indirectly quoted but not underwritten by Beecher. Nor does she promise any action either to continue or suspend the activities. The primary function of this passage is to claim the school's increasing visibility and success.

The details of Hartford Female Seminary's connection with Willis, Beecher, and their community demonstrate how difficult and misleading is the attempt to separate home from school from community—and by extension emphasize how misleading it is to invoke metaphors of public and private spheres to describe the conditions under which gendered behaviors were taught, performed, and parodied. Fanny Fern is a transitional figure, marking both the fictions of womanly retirement she and her peers honored and the simultaneous acknowledgment that many, if not most, of these behaviors were indeed fictions. Fern's autobiographical statements, more than Beecher's or Hale's or Fuller's, proclaim their fictive structure even as they invite cooperative readers to believe them as literal truth. Students of Fern have interpreted her various and contradictory statements of autobiography as the strategy whereby the woman who felt a “lifelong dread of publicity” (Ellen Parton, 28 Feb. 1899, Sophia Smith Collection) avoided public scrutiny. Such readings neatly fit the explanatory pattern so long predominant in structuring our understandings of nineteenth-century womanhood, but do not account for Fern's radicalism (certainly not the stance of a woman determined to avoid notoriety), nor for her determined playing on this willingness of readers to read her texts as transparent in the service of selling more books, nor for her glee in maintaining an ambiguous identity. If Ruth Hall is a sentimental novel about a devoted wife and mother who succeeds in supporting her children despite the machinations of evil male family members, it is also a text that refuses the conventions of private retirement. If Fanny Fern, as her daughter claimed, “said the public had a right to know an author only as such, and should seek to know nothing of the woman” (Ellen Parton, 28 Feb. 1899, Sophia Smith Collection), she nevertheless exploited the public's curiosity. Fern's “How I Look” articulates the difficulty of establishing whether her performed identities resulted from her avoidance of publicity, or whether the illusory nature of her “true identity” resulted as much from readers' determination to fix her as it did from her wish to avoid publicity. To the request of “a correspondent” to describe herself, Fern replies “I should be very happy to answer these questions, did I know myself. I proceed to explain why I cannot tell whether ‘I be I.’” She then narrates a series of occasions upon which readers claim to have identified or described her. At the opera, a “strange gentleman” announces that he knows her “intimately”; in a picture gallery, a portrait “labelled ‘Fanny Fern’” was to be sold; in California, another image “taken smiling” is “peddled round.” The essay concludes with the words of “a man who got into my parlor under cover of ‘New-Year's calls,’” who exclaims, “‘Well, now, I am agreeably disappointed! I thought from the way you writ, that you were a great six-footer of a woman, with snapping black eyes and a big waist, and I am pleased to find you looking so soft and so femi-nine!’” (Ledger 9 Apr. 1870).

Ultimately, we might conclude that Fanny Fern stands as the best exemplar of multiple identities and performed gender, and use her insistence on fictive identity as a lens through which to read her contemporaries. But it is equally important to account for the degree to which she identified herself with masculine norms. Like Beecher's and Hale's, her writing addresses an omnipresent but invisible male gaze. She demonstrates her awareness of the expectations of public discourse especially in her early work. “The Model Husband,” her first column, adeptly articulated cultural and behavioral expectations; many more essays of the same stripe followed. “The Model Wife” gently laughs at but does not seriously challenge conventional wisdom about the notion of “separate spheres.” The humor of “The Model Minister” and of “Deacons' Daughters and Ministers' Sons” is premised on the tension between “reality” and the pressure of ideal stereotypes. Other columns exploit the notion that women writers and readers could be interested only in the sentimental. In these early columns, instrumental in establishing Fern as a writer who could be trusted, women are portrayed as light-minded gossips, dutiful daughters, and nurturing wives.

Yet like Beecher, Fern used the feminine stereotype to pave the way for more daring work. On the same Ledger page as a reprint of one of her most sentimental pieces, “Little Benny,” appears her outspoken and positive review of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (Ruth xxxii). Fern devoted many of her early columns to demonstrating that women writers did not practice their craft at the expense of their housewifely and motherly duties, always concluding that no self-respecting woman would become a writer if it meant that she would neglect the duties men expected of her. As Ruth Hall avers, “No happy woman ever writes” (175). Only in her final columns, written after her reputation was firmly established, did Fern publicly advance the notion that women need not marry, that they might be able to maintain themselves by their independent earnings.

Unlike Beecher and Fuller, Hale and Fern seem to share few similarities. Separated by a generation, their lives demonstrate quite different means by which women learned to write and the different ways they applied those skills. Thus they delimit the outer ranges of how family, school, and community intersected with women's writing. In other ways, however, their similarities are striking. Like their differences, these similarities mark ranges of differentiation from the pattern that is common to Beecher and Fuller. The (auto)biographies of Catharine Beecher, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller seem to confirm Joan Wallach Scott's contention that “identities and experiences are variable phenomena … discursively organized in particular contexts or configurations” (Feminists Theorize 35), while Sarah Josepha Hale's life writings test the limits of that assertion. Beecher and Fuller, for example, both published several different versions of their autobiographies, varying the facts they included and drawing different interpretations of their meaning. Sara Willis, who later in life claimed legal title to her pseudonym, Fanny Fern, utterly refused the fiction of a coherent authorial identity, leaving biographers and scholars to speculate on the degree to which Ruth Hall and the scattered first-person reminiscences that appeared in her weekly newspaper columns represented her life. Hale promulgated an unvaryingly consistent version of her life, always insisting that she was a reluctant writer who undertook her career only to support her fatherless children. Even after those children were grown, Hale maintained this narrative; nor did she alter her dress, her hairstyle, or her public image. Yet common sense, coupled with a few tantalizing hints in her letters suggest that her protestations of invariability masked behaviors as potentially transgressive as those performed by Fanny Fern.

Notes

1. I refer to this writer both as Sara Willis and as Fanny Fern, according to whether I write of her preprofessional life or of the print identity that became synonymous with the biographical subject in later years.

2. The seminary's other paper, the School Gazette, “Published at Study Hall,” was probably circulated within the school, as suggested by its contents—mostly jokes with local referents and essays whose intent is disciplinary. Additionally, since many of these pieces were composed by Catharine Beecher (they are duplicated in her ms. album of poems dedicated to her father), I assume that the main purpose of the School Gazette was to give students practice in penmanship. Neither paper has content that is identifiable, by signature or by style, as being written by Sara Willis.