SOURCE: “The ‘Scribbling Women’ and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,” in American Quarterly, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Spring, 1971, pp. 3-24.

In the following essay, Wood discusses women's writing in mid-nineteenth-century America, with particular emphasis on Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and how the novel deviated from what was considered “appropriate” writing for women.

In January 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne penned a protest which was to be often quoted in later years, against the “d———d mob of scribbling women” who were, in his opinion, both capturing and corrupting the literary market. In a subsequent letter to the same correspondent, his publisher William Ticknor, he made an exception to the indictment he had leveled against his feminine rivals in favor of “Fanny Fern” who had just published a novel entitled Ruth Hall. His comments, which explain not only why he admired her, but why he disliked many of her scribbling sisters, are worth...