Ruth Hall (novel)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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19th century American literature

"Back in the middle of the nineteenth century in America, the women were taking the publishing world by storm. Yes, Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, and Thoreau wrote the enduring classic Walden, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had himself a modest success with The Scarlet Letter, which sold a little over 10,000 copies. But the women were wiping the floor with them, bestseller-wise. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 10,000 copies in the first two weeks of publication, and by the end of the year it would have sold 310,000. But like so much women's writing, no place was reserved in the canon for the other great popular books of that period, and writers like Susan Warner and Susanna Cummins have dwindled in obscurity until excavating literary critics have recently dug them back up. Amongst their number was Sara Willis Eldridge Farrington, who managed to achieve the accolade of being one of the highest paid writers of her era under the name of Fanny Fern. She was famous primarily for her journalism, and out of that came her books, most compilations of her articles, but one an autobiographical novel, Ruth Hall. Like all good bestsellers, the novel Ruth Hall came with controversy attached, as publicity around its publication brought forth the revelation of Fanny Fern’s true identity and the fact that the book told the story of her life. And what a life it was – a good rags to riches tale of a young woman, beset by tragedy and cruel relations who managed to turn her life around for the sake of her children by her writing talents." --Litlove