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Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Children's and Young Adult Literature
"She Had Ceased To Offer Her Stories For Publication": Louise M. Thurston And The Unfinished Charley Roberts Series, Deidre A. Johnson
"She Had Ceased To Offer Her Stories For Publication": Louise M. Thurston And The Unfinished Charley Roberts Series, Deidre A. Johnson
English Faculty Publications
One of the unsolved mysteries of series fiction is that of Louise M. Thurston, a promising author who wrote part of a series about siblings for Lee & Shepard -- then, apparently, just stopped writing. Thurston's brief career covers the four years between 1868-1872 and intersects with two significant trends in 19th-century children's publishing, the growth of Sunday-school libraries and the practice of issuing children's books in series. Her career illustrates in microcosm the markets for beginning writers, and its early termination raises questions about some of the problems they might have encountered. Entwined with Louise's history is that of …
Everything Is Relative: Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow (Aunt Fanny) And Sarah Leaming Barrow Holly (Aunt Fanny's Daughter), Deidre A. Johnson
Everything Is Relative: Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow (Aunt Fanny) And Sarah Leaming Barrow Holly (Aunt Fanny's Daughter), Deidre A. Johnson
English Faculty Publications
For more than forty years Frances Elizabeth Mease Barrow's name – or, rather, that of her pseudonym, "Aunt Fanny" – remained before the public. In the 1850s and 1860s, she published five quirkily-titled series combining humor, moral instruction, and social awareness. By the 1870s and 1880s, her name was associated with children's charities and with club activities and literary salons. When she died in 1894, one obituary characterized her both as an author whose children's books "delighted the grandfathers and grandmothers of the present day" and as "a social star, known to everybody as 'Aunt Fanny.'" Yet even though her …