Abstract
In January 1853, looking back over the year’s novels, the North American Review records the enthusiastic reception of ‘a new venture in the new path [of American moral fiction]… The Wide, Wide World struck a chord that was still vibrating when Queechy came to prolong the thrill.’1 The amazing success of Susan Warner’s first novel, which appeared under the pseudonym of Elizabeth Wetherell2 at the end of 1850, is attested by its sales figures on both sides of the Atlantic. It became a best-seller almost overnight: in the United States it went through fourteen editions in two years, its sales exceeded only by those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and in England Routledge alone sold 80 000 in the first year of its publication.3 Its readership ranged from highbrow critics like Henry James who compared its realism to Flaubert’s4, to ordinary families seeking domestic entertainment. As Warner’s publisher informed her:
I think I may say we have now got up a Wide, Wide World fever: I am told by a correspondent that the trade in Manchester and Liverpool is simply inundated with Wide, Wide Worlds. Ten thousand copies were sold at one English railway station.5
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Notes
[C. Kirkland], ‘Novels and Novelists: Queechy, and The Wide, Wide World’, North American Review, vol. 76 (January 1853), p.112.
These details are taken from Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Magazine-reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), and Edward Halsey Foster, Susan and Anna Warner (Boston: Twayne Publishers, n.d.).
James makes this comparison in an article entitled ‘The Schonberg-Cotta Family’ in the Nation, 14 September, 1865.
Anna B. Warner, Susan Warner (‘Elizabeth Wetherell’) (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), p.420.
See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Nancy Schnog, ‘Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World,’ Genders, no. 4, Spring 1979, p.12.
Quoted in Mary Kelley, Public Woman, Private Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.147.
Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction: A guide to novels by and about women in America1820–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p.12.
Warner, op.cit., p.263.
Susan S. Williams, ‘Widening the World: Susan Warner, her readers, and the assumption of authorship’, American Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 1990), pp.565–6.
Warner, op.cit., p.208.
Susan B. Warner (‘Elizabeth Wetherell’), The Wide, Wide World (New York: The Feminist Press, 1987), p.269. All subsequent references are to this edition and are included in the text.
From an article in the Christian Review, quoted in Warner op.cit., p.344.
Warner, op.cit., p.264.
Joanne Dobson, ‘The Hidden Hand: Subversion of cultural ideology in threemid-nineteenth-century American women’s novels’, American Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2 (Summer 1986), p.224.
Mary Hiatt, ‘Susan Warner’s subtext: The other side of piety’, Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, vol. 8, parts 3–4 (1987), pp.250, 252.
Tompkins, op.cit.
Dobson, op.cit., pp.226–8.
Ibid., p.227.
Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978). In this work, Auerbach discusses Little Women as an instance of the depiction of female bonding in nineteenth-century women’s fiction.
Dobson, op.cit.
Hiatt, op.cit., p.252.
Tompkins, op.cit., p.162.
Schnog, op.cit., p.19.
Ibid., p.20.
Williams, op.cit., pp.577–9.
Elizabeth Sewell, Principles of Education (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865), II, pp.119–20.
Charlotte Yonge, ‘Children’s Literature of the Last Century’, Macmillan’s, vol. XX, no. 118 (1869), p.309.
The most usetul overview of Kristeva’s work with reference to this study is tobe found in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). There are also helpful discussions of her theories in Greene and Kahn (eds), Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1985) and Sara Mills et al., Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1989).
See Ann-Janine Morey, Religion and Sexuality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
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© 1995 Shirley Foster and Judy Simons
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Foster, S., Simons, J. (1995). Susan Warner: The Wide, Wide World. In: What Katy Read. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23933-7_2
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