Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

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 …