Folly as It Flies

A wife can be given a new bonnet, a dress, even a watch—and still be starved for the one thing she needs. Fanny Fern asks husbands to reckon with the quiet damage of a kind word withheld.

In these mid-19th-century essays, Fern turns marriage and family life into sharp, intimate subjects, watching the small daily slights that can sour a home. She challenges husbands who mistake food and clothing for care, and follows a young couple learning to share attention between themselves and their first baby. With wit and tenderness, she takes on selfishness, outside interference, and the unequal demands laid on wives, insisting that love must mean more than duty. Can a marriage learn to give both partners room to be human?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.