SOURCE: “Fatherless Daughters: Sarah Hale and Fanny Fern,” in Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller, University Press of Mississippi, 1997, pp. 26-46.

In the following excerpt, Tonkovich explores the influence of Fanny Fern's home life, education, and the community on her literary efforts. Tonkovich also argues that Fern never considered writing and domesticity as mutually exclusive.

… Grata Sara(h) Payson Willis Eldredge Farrington Parton (who also used the pseudonyms “Tabitha,” “Olivia,” and “Fanny Fern”) is a figure whose multiplicity of names marks the difficulty of positing a stable (auto)biographical subject.¹ A writer who capitalized on the ambiguity of her identity, Fern demonstrates how the relation of writing women to home, school, and community changed as formal education for women became more generally available. As fifth child and third daughter in her family, Sara Willis was distanced from...