Helen Gardner's Wedding Day
Marion Harland
eBook
(, Feb. 20, 2009)
This volume was published in 1870. Marion Harland's novels are mostly antebellum plantation romances, her stories featured heroines who were exemplary domestic women, never independent but always capable. Sometimes referred to as "sentimental fiction" or "woman's fiction," "domestic fiction" refers to a type of novel popular with women readers during the middle of the nineteenth century. Forgotten today by all but a handful of women's domestic and literary historians, Marion Harland (1830-1922) was one of the best known American women in the nineteenth century. She was the author of some 75 works of fiction and domestic advice, hundreds of magazine articles and short stories, and a series of syndicated newspaper advice columns. It is not extravagant to say that Marion Harland was, for many readers, the Julia Child, Danielle Steel, and Dear Abby of her day. A lifelong supporter of the cult of domesticity, Marion Harland was never a feminist, and was in fact briefly allied with the anti-suffrage movement. Nevertheless she promoted an ideal of womanhood that was strong, intellectual, and capable of independent living. Marion Harland continued to write and publish until just before her death at ninety-one.