"Hero strong" and other stories

A teenage orphan from Vermont, Mary Gibson burst onto the literary scene during the early 1850s as a star writer, under the pseudonym Winnie Woodfern, for more than half a dozen Boston "story papers," mass-circulation weekly periodicals that specialized in popular fiction. Although she would soon join such famous woman authors as Fanny Fern and E. D. E. N. Southworth as featured contributors to the New York Ledger, America's greatest story paper, Gibson's subsequent output rarely matched the gender-bending creativity of the tales written in her late teens and early twenties and reprinted in this volume. But "Hero Strong" and Other Stories does much more than recover the work of a forgotten literary prodigy. As explained by historian Daniel A. Cohen, Gibson's tales also illuminate major interrelated transformations in American girlhood and American women's authorship.^ Challenging traditional gender expectations, thousands of girls of Gibson's generation not only aspired to public careers as writers, artists, educators, and even doctors but also began to experiment with new forms of "female masculinity" in attitude, bearing, behavior, dress, and sexuality--a pattern only gradually d