class: middle # Fanny Fern and _Ruth Hall_
### Matthew J. Lavin ### Clinical Assistant Professor of English and Director of Digital Media Lab ### University of Pittsburgh ### October 2018 --- class: middle
### In 1855 Robert J. Bonner contract Fanny Fern "to write exclusively" for the
New York Ledger
(Smith XVI)
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### Bonner started out as a printer. He bought the
Merchants' Ledger and Statistical Review
and immediately changed the name to the
New York Ledger
(Smith XVII)
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### By 1860, the
New York Ledger
had a circulation of 400,000, with 50,000 copies sent by mail each issue (Smith XVII)
--- class: middle # Discussion
### How can we connect Robert J. Bonner's story and the history of the
New York Ledger
to the modernization and industralization of print and publishing as we understand it?
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### The author who published as Fanny Fern was born Sara Payson Willis in 1811 (Smith XIX)
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### Willis came from a long line of "men of letters" (Smith XXI)
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### At this time, Boston was the center of American publishing (Smith XXII)
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### Willis married in 1837 and had three daughters before being widowed in 1846" (Smith XXVII)
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### Willis worked as a seamstress and a teacher but couldn't support herself. She married Samuel P. Farrington, a family friend, in 1849. (Smith XXVII)
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### Willis left her husband after two years, and he retaliated by accusing her of adultery (Smith XXVII)
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### Meanwhile, many women were succeeding as "shrewd participants in the periodical press" (Smith XXX)
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### In 1851, Willis sent work to her brother Nathaniel and he replied that New York was "the most over-stocked market in the country, for writers" (Smith XXXI)
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### Willis and her brother became estranged for years after his harsh words and actions (Smith XXXII)
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### Circa fall of 1851, she started using the pen name Fenny Fern (Smith XXXIII)
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### Fern was outrageously successul, first with weekly dispatches and columns, then with her 1854 publication of
Ruth Hall
(Smith XXXIV)
--- class: middle # Discussion
### How does the novel establish norms and rules that limit Ruth's sense of choice? How does Ruth react to these limitations?
### Who are the characters who limit or empower Ruth, and how do they do this? --- class: middle # Discussion
### How does the novel (so far) depict and characterize readers and reading?
### Some passages: - #### "not a novel" (1); "rational reading" (14) - #### "reading his newspaper" (4) - #### "without lifting his eyes from the Almanac" (39) - #### "the characters to be read by the light of eternity" (25) - #### poetry (29); picture book (33) - #### "human tower of Babel" (44); "stereotyped conventionalism" (55)