Fanny Fern, born Sara Willis (July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American novelist, children's writer, humorist, and newspaper columnist in the 1850s to 1870s. Fern's popularity has been attributed to her conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers. Her best-known work, the fictional autobiography Ruth Hall (1854), has become a popular subject among feminist literary scholars.
Fern developed a writing style that closely reflected her pugnacious personality, with its common-sensical optimistic approach, Always leavened with a dash of humor. She was an individualist who sought answers to social problems through individual personality development rather than politicized organizational movements. She did tackle such major issues as prostitution, divorce, child labor, and the horrors of slum living. Instead of calling for the radical reconstruction of society, she told her large audience of middle-class women to improve their health and their minds, urging downtrodden wives to be patient and bore from within. (source: Wikipedia)
Fern was extremely successful in her lifetime as a columnist. She was said to fit her material and subject matter to the audience. Many readers of weekly literary papers were women, and Fern addressed them in a conversational style, often using interjections and exclamation points, while tackling topics that concerned the daily life of ordinary women. Her readers were wives and mothers who worried about their children, current fashions, difficult husbands, and aggravating relatives. Sometimes they felt oppressed, depressed, or stressed. Fern expressed their problems in plain language, addressing women's suffrage, the woman's right to her children in a divorce, unfaithful husbands, social customs that restricted women's freedom, and sometimes just having a bad day.

The best-selling of her books was her first one. Published in June 1853, Fern Leaves sold 46,000 copies in four months (which, according to its publishers, surpassed even the performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin), and over 70,000 copies by the end of the year.