“I Thought From the Way You Writ, That You Were a Great Six-Footer of a Woman”:

The poetics of women’s autobiography may be useful in considering the poetics of women’s newspaper essay writing. Fanny Fern’s position as a woman modifies the newspaper essay project in several ways. Only after a series of tragedies did Sara Willis turn to the newspaper essay—the public voice—and to Fanny Fern. The deaths of her younger sister, mother, eldest child, and husband between 1844 and 1846 and the refusal of her relatives to provide financial or emotional support led to a disastrous second marriage and her attempts to support herself and her two children by trying to obtain a position as a schoolteacher and by working as a seamstress. In autobiography, “there have always been women who cross the line between public and private utterance, unmasking their desire for the empowering self-interpretation of autobiography as they unmasked in their lives the desire for publicity”.