A collection of Whitcher's humorous sketches, edited by Alice B. Neal, was published posthumously in 1855, becoming a landmark of early American comic literature.
In 1855, three years after her death, The Widow Bedott Papers was published as a collected volume, gathering together the scattered magazine sketches Frances Miriam Whitcher had written throughout the 1840s featuring her most famous comic creation, the garrulous, husband-hunting Widow Priscilla Bedott. The book was edited with an introductory memoir by fellow writer and editor Alice B. Neal, who had long championed Whitcher's talent.
The exact publication day within 1855 is not documented in surviving sources, but the book's cultural impact is well established: it became an immediate popular success, going through numerous printings over subsequent decades and cementing Whitcher's posthumous reputation. The Widow Bedott character—a comic vernacular voice satirizing rural manners, gossip, courtship rituals, and small-town pretension—is considered by literary historians to be one of the first fully realized comic female protagonists in American literature, predating and arguably influencing later American vernacular humorists.
The volume's success helped establish a durable place for women within the American humor tradition at a time when comic writing was overwhelmingly regarded as a male domain, exemplified by contemporaries like Seba Smith and other regional dialect humorists. Scholars such as Linda A. Morris have since highlighted The Widow Bedott Papers as foundational to understanding nineteenth-century American women's engagement with satire and social critique through popular print culture.