The Wide, Wide World

Exceeded in popularity in its time only by Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Wide, Wide World is a feminist Huckleberry Finn. First published in 1850, this domestic epic narrates the seven-year pilgrimage of a girl sent out into the world at age ten by a dying mother and a careless father. Moved from relative to relative, Ellen Montgomery astonishes by remaining faithful to her mother’s memory and to her Christian teachings. As Jane Tompkins notes in her afterword, Warner's (1819-1865) novel is "compulsively readable, absorbing, and provoking to an extraordinary degree... More than any other book of its time, it embodies, uncompromisingly, the values of the Victorian era."

Susan Warner (1819-1865) began writing novels to aid her own impoverished family. She wrote religious and children's fiction, and her novel The Wide, Wide World was one of the most widely read nineteenth-century American stories.