BIOGRAPHIES

Adams, Florence Bannard. Fanny Fern; or A Pair of Flaming Shoes. West Trenton, N.J.: n.p., 1966, 30 p.

Focusing on Fanny Fern's journalistic writing, particularly for the New York Ledger, discusses how her family and domestic life influenced her stance on a variety of contemporary events and issues.

Eckert, Robert P., Jr. “Friendly, Fragrant, Fanny Ferns.” The Colophon: A Quarterly for Collectors and Lovers of Books, No. 18 (1934).

A short but thorough biography of Fanny Fern, focusing for the most part on her personal life (as opposed to her literary career) and personality.

Greenwood, Grace. “Fanny Fern—Mrs. Parton.” In Eminent Women of the Age: Being Narratives of the Lives and Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation, by James Parton, et al., 1869. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1974, pp. 66-84.

A short, anecdotal biography of Fern. The essay, published during her lifetime, was written by a fellow woman writer.

Warren, Joyce W. “Fanny Fern, 1811-1872.” Legacy 2, No. 2 (Fall 1985): 54-60.

Provides a brief biography of Fern and explores why her literary accomplishments were remarkable for a mid-nineteenth-century woman.

———. Introduction to Ruth Hall and Other Writings, by Fanny Fern, edited by Joyce W. Warren, pp. ix-xxxix. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

A short introduction to Fern's life, followed by a detailed analysis of Ruth Hall that pays particular attention to how the novel differs from other nineteenth-century novels.

CRITICISM

Berlant, Lauren. “The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, pp. 265-81. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Discusses Fern's work within the context of industrial capitalism, the new female culture industry, and “sentimental” writing.

Huf, Linda. “Ruth Hall (1855): The Devil and Fanny Fern.” In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: The Writer as Heroine in American Literature, pp. 16-35. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983.

Presents critics' responses to the publication of Fern's Ruth Hall, and argues that the novel demonstrates how Fern was both an “angel” and a “devil.”

Warren, Joyce W. “Fanny Fern's Rose Clark.” Legacy 8, No. 2 (Fall 1991); 92-103.

Describes how Fern's second novel, Rose Clark, was based in large part on Fern's unsuccessful second marriage to Samuel Farrington. The critic also documents some of the problems with the novel's form and content and summarizes contemporary critical reactions to the work.

———. “The Gender of American Individualism: Fanny Fern, the Novel, and the American Dream.” In Politics, Gender, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society, edited by Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers, pp. 150-57. Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press, 1992.

Argues that notions of the “American Dream” and individualism in the mid-nineteenth century “so obdurately excluded women that American reviewers could not even recognize [these concepts when they] appeared in the form of a novel [Ruth Hall] in which the American individualist was a woman.”

———. “Subversion versus Celebration: The Aborted Friendship of Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman.” In Patrons and Protégées: Gender, Friendship, and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, pp. 59-93. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Discusses how and why Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman became friends, her reaction to the publication of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and their eventual falling-out in 1857.

Zaczek, Barbara Maria. “Deconstructing the Definition of Female Letters as Sentimental, Nonliterary, and Private.” In Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material, pp. 138-74. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

Examines the work of three women writers (including Fern's Ruth Hall) to show how the function of letters in the novel had changed by the early nineteenth century from a means of manipulation to a form of communication.

Additional coverage of Fern's life and career is contained in the following source published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 7 and 43.