This week, we’re welcoming historical fiction author Debra Brenegan, whose title SHAME THE DEVIL explores the history of writer Fanny Fern in the early 19th century. Join us Sunday, when Debra will be here to talk about the novel and offer a copy to a lucky winner. Here's the blurb:
Shame the Devil tells the remarkable and true
story of Fanny Fern (the pen name of Sara Payson Willis), one of the most
successful, influential, and popular writers of the nineteenth century. A
novelist, journalist, and feminist, Fern (1811-1872) outsold Harriet Beecher
Stowe, won the respect of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and served as literary mentor to
Walt Whitman. Scrabbling in the depths of poverty before her meteoric rise to
fame and fortune, she was widowed, escaped an abusive second marriage, penned
one of the country's first prenuptial agreements, married a man eleven years
her junior, and served as a nineteenth-century Oprah to her hundreds of
thousands of fans. Her weekly editorials in the pages of the New York Ledger
over a period of about twenty years chronicled the myriad controversies of her
era and demonstrated her firm belief in the motto, "Speak the truth, and
shame the devil." Through the story of Fern and her contemporaries,
including Walt Whitman, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet
Jacobs, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shame the Devil brings the intellectual
and social ferment of mid-nineteenth-century America to life.
Author blog