Beatrice Fairfax has been eulogized in songs and lyrics. Biographers have called her a national grandma, a one-person institution, a name "as familiar as the national anthem," and the "top-ranking purveyor of balm to the troubled." For decades, America confessed its transgressions and woes through her columns. Not since the public confessions in the early Christian church had there been anything like it. Her love forum, one of the first in the country, is the oldest surviving uninterrupted advice column in any American newspaper. Manning's column started nineteen years before Dorothy Dix's. At its peak, the column was syndicated to 200 newspapers by King Features, the syndicating agency of William Randolph Hearst's chain of newspapers. A Hearst biographer has written that in an age when the list of Hearst's employees read like a who's who of American journalism, Beatrice Fairfax was "one of Hearst's greatest acquisitions."

"Beatrice Fairfax," in...