"Hero Strong" and Other Stories: Tales of Girlhood Ambition, Female Masculinity, and Women's Worldly Achievement in Antebellum America

A teenaged 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 t...