SOURCE: “Inscribing and Defining: The Many Voices of Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall,” in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 111-27.

In the following essay, Harris argues that Fanny Fern had a deliberate strategy in mind while writing Ruth Hall: according to Harris, Fern subverted the constructs of sentimental literature in order to express her own ideas about women's independence and to challenge the very notion of the “ideal” nineteenth-century woman.

Fanny Fern's (Sara Payson Willis) 1855 novel Ruth Hall¹ is the story of a woman who, losing her economic security on her husband's death, and finding herself sole support of two small children, becomes a highly successful popular writer. The book has autobiographical elements: Willis did lose her first child and first husband and was thrown out on the world to fend for herself. Like her heroine, she too went through a period of trial...