Occupation Writer Role Novelist Name Frances Victor | Genre History | |
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Spouse Jackson Barritt; Henry Clay Victor Books The river of the West, The new Penelope - and other, Eleven years in the Rocky mo, All over Oregon and Was, Atlantis arisen | ||
History Writing for Publication - Alexis Altrichter
Frances Auretta Fuller (Barritt) Victor (pen names: Florence Fane, Dorothy D.) (May 23, 1826 – November 14, 1902) was an American historian and historical novelist. She has been described as "the first Oregon historian to gain regional and national attention."
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Life
Fuller Victor was born in Rome, New York and was raised with her sister Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, also a writer, in Ohio and Pennsylvania. She was educated in a ladies' seminary in Wooster, Ohio. The sisters both published stories and poems in the Morris & Willis Home Journal, and in 1848 they moved to New York together.
Frances moved to St. Clair, Michigan in 1851 to help care for her mother and younger sisters. She first married Jackson Barritt in 1853, and she and her husband homesteaded near Omaha, Nebraska Territory. She left Barritt, however, returning to live with Metta in New York. She married Henry C. Victor, a naval engineer and brother of Metta's husband, in 1862.
The couple moved to San Francisco the year they were married and then to Oregon in 1864, settling in Portland.
Following the move to Oregon, Fuller Victor's writing shifted from fiction and feature articles to book-length regional histories. Over the next 13 years, she compiled first-hand accounts of the history of Oregon from territorial leaders like Joseph Meek, Oliver Applegate, and Matthew Deady. Her diligent studies informed both her fiction and her historical writing, contributing to her success as a writer. Her fiction in this period was considered to accurately capture the spirit of western expansion and the notion of Manifest Destiny. She also continued to write about women's rights, and among the publications she wrote for was Abigail Scott Duniway's The New Northwest.
Henry C. Victor died in the wreck of the steamship Pacific off Cape Flattery on November 4, 1875. In need of money, Fuller Victor moved back to San Francisco to accept a 10-year contract offered by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. The terms of the contract required her to turn over her extensive collections and research. She contributed major portions of Bancroft's monumental work, The History of the West, though Bancroft published her work under his own name.
After she left Bancroft's company, Fuller Victor returned to Oregon, where she was commissioned by the Oregon Legislative Assembly to write a history of the Anglo-Indian wars, which was titled The Early Indian Wars of Oregon. To cover her living expenses, she also sold face cream and other articles door-to-door.
Fuller Victor was buried at River View Cemetery in Portland.