Your Favorite Listicle Is Back: NPR Brings '5 Best-Selling Female Writers You May Not Have Heard Of'

We want more! Of course, the NPR list includes, poet: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. (And continues, after the list, to suggest the reasons why a writer might have been popular in the nineteenth century.) Check it out:

A handful of popular female writers of 19th century America — such as Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe — continue to be widely taught and read. Others who were extremely well-known back then, for some reason or other, are today pretty much relegated to the history books.

Take Fanny Fern for instance.

The nom de plume of Sara Payson Willis — who was born in 1811 and died in 1872 — Fanny Fern "was hugely popular in the 19th century" and a highly paid journalist, says Tiffany Aldrich MacBain, who teaches 19th century American literature at the University of Puget Sound. Fanny Fern "had a newspaper column that was widely syndicated; it was humorous and cutting and smart and accessible, and people gobbled it up."

Fern "was resuscitated by feminist scholars in the 1970s," MacBain tells NPR. "Today, if people read — or write about — Fern, they tend to focus on her novel, Ruth Hall ​(1854), which was a best-seller. Still, I'd guess that most people today have not heard of her." You can find Ruth Hall at Internet Archive.

Library shelves are loaded with books, penned by American writers, that were vastly circulated and lauded in the 1800s but are barely known today. Now and then one is reprinted.

Here are a few best-selling writers of the 19th century — with links to books — that may be new to you:

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911). Renowned as a poet and a novelist, Harper, born in Baltimore in 1825, was also a public speaker. "She helped slaves escape through the Underground Railroad and wrote frequently for anti-slavery newspapers, earning her a reputation as the mother of African American journalism," according to the Poetry Foundation. When she lectured in Philadelphia in February of 1867, the local Evening Telegraph noted that certain of her poems exhibited "more than ordinary depth of thought and fervor of expression." Her hallmark work of fiction, Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted, was published in 1892. When it appeared, the Philadelphia Times review on Nov. 26, 1892, stated that the novel "is an exquisite delineation of one of the noblest of characters among the rescued slaves and the plot is delightfully woven as the heroine is grand in all the qualities of elevated and refine womanhood." You can read Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted (1892) at Project Gutenberg. [...]

Learn more at NPR.