"Such are some of our impressions of Fanny Fern, to which we may add, that she has the finest form of any woman in New York, and that no one of the names recently assigned her in the papers is her true name. In ordinary circumstances, we should not have thought it right thus to describe the characteristics of a lady; our sole, and we think, sufficient justification is, the publication of statements respecting her, only less vulgar than calumnious."
The following review of Ruth Hall is from the pen of a talented woman, far above any feelings of pique or jealousy.
"Our first recollections of 'Fanny Fern' are connected with her appearance in the Olive Branch a few years since. We were then entirely ignorant of her real name and position, nor did we, in common with the indifferent public, feel any particular interest or curiosity respecting them. The impression of the careless reader would have been that the spicy scraps bearing this signature were the production of some hoydenish school-girl, ambitious to see her writings in print. With the supposition that they were the work of a young lady, was associated an indefinite, but slightly painful feeling that the writer was not sufficiently endowed with female delicacy. While a perfect sketch, artistically wrought out, and disfigured by no defects of style or coarse inuendoes, partially filled a column, the same column often contained another article, full of these blemishes. Vulgar expressions and exclamations were often used, though when these writings were afterwards collected and published in a book, these were carefully pruned away. Some judicious friend had evidently guided the pen to strike out phraseology which would have been injurious if not fatal to Fanny's rising fame. Whether this judicious friend was the 'Mr. Tibbetts' through whose agency her first work was introduced to the publishers, who received and forwarded to her all the proofs, reading the whole aloud to her as fast as it appeared in type, we are not able to say. Upon 'Fern Leaves,' and successive volumes, thus carefully pruned of what too plainly revealed a certain coarseness in the habits of thought of the writer, the public has doubtless passed a just verdict. With the fame thus won, and the independence thus secured, would that 'Fanny Fern' had been satisfied.