Born on May 23, 1826, in Rome, New York, Frances Fuller grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and in Wooster, Ohio. She and her younger sister Metta Fuller (Victor) were educated in a female seminary in Wooster. They both contributed poems and stories to local periodicals and to the Home Journal of New York, and in 1848 they moved to New York City. In that year Frances Fuller published her first book, Anizetta, the Guajira: or the Creole of Cuba. In 1851 the sisters together published Poems of Sentiment and Imagination, with Dramatic and Descriptive Pieces.
Frances left New York to help care for her now-widowed mother and younger sisters in St. Clair, Michigan, that year. In 1853 she married and homesteaded near Omaha, Nebraska Territory, but she eventually left her husband and rejoined Metta in New York. She wrote East and West; or, The Beauty of Willard╒s Mill and The Card Claim: A Tale of the Upper Missouri, both 1862, for Beadle and Adams╒s Dime Novel series edited by Metta╒s husband, Orville J. Victor.
In May 1862 Frances Fuller married Victor╒s brother, Henry C. Victor, a navy engineer, and a year later they moved to San Francisco. There she contributed to the Golden Era, the Overland Monthly, and the San Francisco Bulletin under the name ╥Florence Fane.╙ In 1864 she and her husband settled in Oregon. She became deeply interested in local history, and over the next 13 years she produced The River of the West, 1870, All Over Oregon and Washington, a travel book, 1872, and The New Penelope, a collection of stories, 1877. From 1878 through 1890 she worked with Hubert H. Bancroft on his monumental 28-volume History of the Pacific States. Although Bancroft claimed authorship of the entire series, Victor was in fact the author of The History of Oregon, two volumes, 1886╨1888; The History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, 1890; The History of Nevada Colorado, and Wyoming, 1890; a large part of The History of the Northwest Coast, two volumes, 1884; and portions of the volumes on California and British Columbia. In 1890 she retired to Oregon, where she wrote Atlantis Arisen, a revision of her earlier travel book on Washington and Oregon, 1891, The Early Indian Wars of Oregon, 1894, and Poems, 1900. She died in Portland, Oregon, on November 14, 1902.
