SOURCE: “Sentiment and Satire: Fern Leaves,” in Fanny Fern, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 23-39.

In the following essay, Walker provides an overview of the prevailing themes and topics of Fanny Fern's newspaper columns, including those reprinted in Fern Leaves and Shadows and Sunbeams (the title of the reprinted version of Fern Leaves, Second Series).

The Rise of the Columnist

The twentieth-century newspaper, with its clear distinction between the objective reporting of news and the opinions expressed on editorial pages, is the product of a long evolution in which columns such as those of Fanny Fern played an important role in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the editorial pages and the choice of which stories to give prominence may still cause newspapers to be regarded as “liberal” or “conservative,” their political biases are quite muted when compared to the overt partisanship of America's earliest newspapers. Nathaniel Willis's creation of the Eastern...