Ruth Hall

Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, first published in 1855, was a runaway success of its day. The novel mines the author's own life for its material: a young wife loses her first child and then her devoted husband, is cut off from her relatives in a painful rift, and must turn to writing to keep herself afloat. The story is told in brief sketches, fragments of conversation the narrator happens to overhear, and loose scenes rather than a smoothly running plot. That unusual form matches its daring subject matter, and the book still reads as surprisingly fresh.