Ann S. Stephens

Career

Edward established a grocery business in Portland. When it failed, Stephens and her husband co-founded Portland Magazine, with herself as editor and him as publisher. Author and critic John Neal, whom she met shortly after her arrival in Portland, mentored her in this undertaking. The magazine was a monthly literary periodical where some of her early work first appeared. She became editor of The Ladies Companion and adopted the humorous pseudonym Jonathan Slick. Over the next few years she wrote more than twenty-five serial novels plus short stories and poems for several well known periodicals which included Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's Magazine. In 1843, she and her husband purchased the Brother Jonathan literary journal and hired Neal to serve as editor. Her first novel Fashion and Famine was published in 1854. She started her own magazine Mrs Stephens' Illustrated New Monthly in 1856, it was published by her husband. The magazine merged with Peterson's Magazine a few years later.

The term "dime novel" originated with Stephens's Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, printed in the first book in Beadle & Adams's Beadle’s Dime Novels series, dated June 9, 1860. The novel was a reprint of Stephens's earlier serial that appeared in the Ladies' Companion magazine in February, March, and April 1839. Later, the Grolier Club listed Malaeska as the most influential book of 1860. Some of her other work includes High Life in New York (1843), Alice Copley: A Tale of Queen Mary's Time (1844), The Diamond Necklace and Other Tale (1846), The Old Homestead (1855), The Rejected Wife (1863) and A Noble Woman (1871).

Works

Alice Copley: A Tale of Queen Mary's Time A Noble Woman Bellehood and Bondage Bertha's Engagement The Curse of Gold, 1869 The Diamond Necklace and Other Tale The Deserted Wife Doubly False Fashion and Famine 1854 The Gold Brick, 1866 The Gulf Between Them The Heiress of Greenhurst: An autobiography, 1857 High Life in New York, 1873 Katharine Allen; or, The Gold Brick The Ladies' Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting, and Needlework, 1854 Lord Hope's Choice Mabel's Mistake, 1868 Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, 1860 Married in Haste Mary Derwent: A Tale of Wyoming and Mohawk Valleys, 1858 Myra: The Child of Adoption, 1860 A Noble Woman, 1871 Norston's Rest, 1877 The Old Countess, 1873 The Old Homestead, 1855 Palaces and Prisons Phemie Frost's Experiences, 1874 Pictorial History of the War for the Union, vol.1 1863, vol.2 1866 The Portland Sketch Book, 1836 The Reigning Belle, 1885 The Rejected Wife Ruby Gray's Strategy Silent Struggles, 1865 The Soldiers' Orphans Sybil Chase; or, The Valley Ranche, 1861 The Wife's Secret Wives and Widows, 1869 The Lady Mary