From Farm to Fortune, or, Only a Farmer's Daughter

About this issue

By Grace Shirley This serial opens with Marion Marlowe, a seventeen-year-old farmer's daughter with musical talent, expressing her dissatisfaction with rural life from a hilltop overlooking her father's property and the Poor Farm. Making a vow to escape her circumstances, Marion encounters Bert Jackson, an orphan boy from the Poor Farm, being brutally whipped by the keeper Matt Jenkins for a broken arm. Marion intervenes heroically, snatching the whip away and defying Jenkins. Later, her twin sister Dollie reveals their father is pressuring her to marry the boring farmer Silas Johnson, threatening to ruin her life as he did their sister Samantha's. Marion and Dollie discuss their shared dreams of escaping farm drudgery through their musical talents—Marion as a singer, Dollie as a pianist—and finding noble, loving husbands rather than submitting to their father's control.