Chapter 2 - Annie S. Swan’s Friendly Fiction

Summary

CH 2: Over the course of her fifty-year career writing serial fiction, short stories, and opinion pieces for an array of periodicals, Annie S. Swan repeatedly attempted to reconcile her prolific literary output and her extensive public commitments with a middle-class ideal of domestic femininity. She carefully created distinct authorial personae for each of her major publication venues, shaping both her self-representation and her fiction to address the class and gender of each periodical’s target audience. A comparison of the personae that Swan constructed and the type of fiction she wrote for the People’s Friend, the Woman at Home, and The British Weekly demonstrates how these three periodicals approached the issue of women’s work beyond the home – an issue that was particularly fraught for Swan as celebrity author, wife, and mother. Her most successful role was as counselor and role model to the primarily working-class female readership of The People’s Friend, for whom her fiction served a compensatory function, providing a much-needed escape from their daily toil within and without the home.