Abstract
Fanny Fern (real name Sara Payson Willis Parton) was one of the most profitable American columnists and novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Fern sustained her celebrity status largely through unauthorised reprints of her articles in American and British papers. Consequently, her public image was for the most part constructed through those reprinted articles, which were usually framed by speculations about her private life. This article examines the implications and limitations of Fern’s efforts to stabilise the dissemination of her public image in periodicals by using the relatively more stable form of the book. As a celebrity, she had limited control over the way she was publicly represented. As a woman in the public sphere, she was particularly vulnerable to slander and libel. The circulation of a spurious biography entitled The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (1855), alongside her sanctioned autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, profited from her literary brand while simultaneously undermining it. Examining how these competing narratives about Fern’s private life – one fictionalised, one unauthorised – shaped her literary reputation at home and in England, this paper argues that textual representations as well as material market choices, including book bindings and advertising techniques, shaped authorship in the increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary market of the mid-century in ways that both benefited and imperilled the female writer.
Highlights
This article examines how competing unauthorised and fictionalised narratives about the private life of the popular American author Fanny Fern affect the construction of her literary brand in an increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary marketplace
The British edition of the book references her pen name by including a fern stamp on the cover, resembling the bindings of Fern’s authorised works. This edition of Life and Beauties has the same binding to the British edition of Fern’s novel Ruth Hall, both complementing with ferns illustration on their cover
It is true that Life and Beauties sold well because of Fern’s literary brand, running into several American and British editions
Summary
This article examines how competing unauthorised and fictionalised narratives about the private life of the popular American author Fanny Fern affect the construction of her literary brand in an increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary marketplace. “public image” and “branding” sometimes overlap, the term “brand” emphasises how the commercialisation of popular writers shapes their authorship and influences the way their readers interpret their literary work In this sense, branding signifies the fraught relationship between the market and the author. O’Neill researches the relationship between nineteenth-century American celebrity culture and the emergence of the “personalization” of the public sphere (2017: 2) She analysed the way Fern’s periodical writings established a sense of intimacy with her readers. The circulation of Fern’s literary brand encapsulates the opportunities and limitations of the professionalisation of writing for women and demonstrates the marketability of female writers in the second half of the nineteenth century It reveals the complexity and precarity of establishing female authorship in an increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary marketplace
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