Abstract
S o m e t i m e a f t e r J u l y 1851 , Mary Field Williams Gibson, a teenage orphan from Vermont, moved to Boston to seek her fortune. By the following summer, the seventeen-year-old had begun publishing poems, sketches, and short stories in several of the city’s “story papers,” weekly periodicals that imitated the format of conventional newspapers but were mostly filled with popular fiction. During the early 1850s, more than half a dozen such papers were based in Boston, each claiming a national readership numbering in the tens of thousands. In that crowded and competitive field, editors scrambled to procure a sufficient quantity and wide enough variety of original American fiction to appeal to a heterogeneous mass audience. “Stories, give us stories!,” the editors frantically demanded, and aspiring young authors of both sexes gladly answered their calls. And so, writing mainly under the pseudonym “Winnie Woodfern,” Gibson soon established herself as a regular contributor to several of Boston’s most popular story papers. Responding to the varied needs of her editors, Gibson mastered a remarkably eclectic repertoire, including prose reveries, light satirical sketches, comical Yankee dialect pieces, sentimental narratives,
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
