This thesis studies the progressive nature of women’s writing and the various factors that helped and hindered the successful publication of women’s written works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The thesis interrogates culturally encoded definitions of the term “success” in relation to the status of these women writers. In a time when success meant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “attainment of wealth or position”, women could never achieve a level of success equal to the male elite. The dichotomous worldview, in which women were excluded from almost all active participation in the public sphere, led to a literary protest by women. However, the male-privileged binary system is seen critically to affect women’s literary success. Hence, a redefinition of success will specifically refer to the literary experience of these women writers and a long-lasting recognition of this experience in the twentieth century. An examination of literary techniques used in key works from Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen suggests that there was a critical double standard with which women writers were constantly faced. The literary techniques, used by the earlier writers, fail in overcoming this critical double standard because of their emphasis on revolution. However, the last two women writers become literary successes (according to my reinterpretation of the term) because of their particular emphasis on amelioration rather than revolution. The conclusion of the thesis suggests that despite the “unsuccessful” literary attempts by the first three women authors, there is an overall positive progression in women’s journey toward literary success. Described as the ‘generational effect’, this becomes the fundamental point of the study, because together these women represent a combined movement which challenges a system of patriarchal tradition, encouraging women to continue to push the gender relations’ boundaries in order to be seen as individual, successful writers.

The purpose of this study is to trace how Sara Willis Parton achieved unprecedented literary celebrity status as Fanny Fern during the first three years of her professional career, 1851-1853. While most critics point to her famously lucrative contract with the most popular newspaper of the 1850s, the New York Ledger, in 1854 as the beginning of her fame, I argue that she had already fully achieved that fame and had done so by writing for small Boston newspapers and publishing a highly successful collection of her articles by 1853. Further, Fern was able to achieve such a high level of success because of a keen business sense, intuitive marketing savvy, an ability to promote herself, an original writing style, and a creative use of personas. My study provides an important addition to Fern scholarship by addressing the largely overlooked early years of her writing career. To date, scholars either make no mention of her first three years or do so only to demonstrate the point that Fern achieved notable success when she signed a contract for one hundred dollars a column with Robert Bonner, publisher and editor of the New York Ledger. Prior to that contract, Fern worked as a freelance writer for the Boston Olive Branch and the Boston True Flag, earning less than five dollars for each sketch she submitted. The critical assumption has been that her initial work prepared her for the fame she would achieve writing for Bonner, but in fact Bonner would not have hired her had she not already achieved significant fame, for Bonner hired only highly celebrated writers. My study explores how Fanny Fern became a famous writer. When she began writing, Fern wrote under a number of previously unknown pseudonyms for local newspapers, but within three years her distinctive style, rhetorical skill, and iconoclastic persona had made ―Fanny Fern a household name. Fern‘s unique ability to engage a popular audience, I would argue, is the principal difference between Fern and other famous contemporary women writers.