Fern leaves from Fanny's port-folio. 2d series. With original designs by Fred M. Coffin.

by Fanny Fern

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

420 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1854

About the author

Fanny Fern, born Sara Willis (July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American newspaper columnist, humorist, novelist, and author of children's stories in the 1850s-1870s. Fern's great popularity has been attributed to her conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers. By 1855, Fern was the highest-paid columnist in the United States, commanding $100 per week for her New York Ledger column.

A collection of her columns published in 1853 sold 70,000 copies in its first year. Her best-known work, the fictional autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a popular subject among feminist literary scholars.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading Fern's novel Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time recently, I was eager to start on her collected columns, five volumes of which are available at Gutenberg. In 1855 Fern was the highest paid newspaper columnist in the USA, and I was curious to see what she wrote about day in and day out from 1852 to 1872.

Fern Leaves was printed in 1853, with 120 of her columns included. If Fanny were writing today, she would still have an extremely popular column, or more likely blog. She wrote about the world she saw around her, whether it was right outside her window or during walks around town or after reading some article (or even personal ad) in the newspaper. She had a comfortable, friendly way of writing that makes the reader feel as if you are sitting together at a tea table having a little chat. This does not mean she is always saccharine sweet, not by any means. She had lived through some dramatic experiences: they influenced her outlook on life, and she was never afraid to express
herself. But this sometimes bitterness, sometimes righteous anger at the state of the world of her day makes her all the more real, and must have been part of the reason she was so popular.

Have to admit she dropped more than a few points in my eyes when I noticed derogatory comments here and there about Jews, old maids, and black people. Sign of the times and all that, of course, but it was still irritating. And these days I have to wonder if 'the times' have really changed as much as we like to believe.....but that is a separate rant, isn't it.

Fern was married twice, the second time being so disagreeable due to her husband's domineering attitude that she divorced him after two years. Many columns take on an anti-man slant which I can hardly blame her for, having experienced a dud relationship or two myself, but she does at times seem overly harsh. But when I reviewed her Wiki article again I saw that she had left her second husband in 1851, and divorced him two years later, so of course many of these columns were written when she was extremely antagonistic towards men. How could she keep from expressing herself somehow? I will be curious to see if that harshness mellows in her next collections.

Here is a description of a newspaper editor from her piece Will Grey. He has run away from the farm home and is trying to get a job at a newspaper, facing the scary editor behind his desk: His proportions very much resembled an apoplectic bag of flour, surmounted by an apple.

This comes from Our Nellie, which tells of a girl who could have married any one of dozens of wonderful men but chose one who took her to the city and began to force her to live according to his rules. Nellie apparently did not have the same spirit Fanny herself did, because she wilted and died at age 18. It gives a hint of what Fern went through in her second marriage:
Ah! there is no law to protect woman from negative abuse!—no mention made in the statute book (which men frame for themselves), of the constant dropping of daily discomforts which wear the loving heart away—no allusion to looks or words that are like poisoned arrows to the sinking spirit. No! if she can show no mark of brutal fingers on her delicate flesh, he has fulfilled his legal promise to the letter—to love, honor and cherish her.

I would have liked to sit down and chat with Ms. Fern. And I wonder what she would say if she could look around and write about the world of today?