 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(June 2007) |
 Frontispiece from an 1853 edition | |
| Author | Susan Warner |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
Publication date | 1850 |
| Media type | |
The Wide, Wide World is an 1850 novel by Susan Warner, published under the pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell. It is often acclaimed as America's first bestseller.
The Wide, Wide World is a work of sentimentalism about the life of young Ellen Montgomery. The story begins with Ellen's happy life being disrupted by the fact that her mother is very ill and her father must take her to Europe, requiring Ellen to leave home to live with an almost-unknown aunt. Though Ellen tries to act strong for her mother's sake, she is devastated and can find solace in nothing.
Eventually the day comes when Ellen must say goodbye to her mother and travel in the company of strangers to her aunt's home. Unfortunately these strangers are unkind to Ellen and she tries to leave the boat on which they are traveling. An old man sees Ellen crying and tells her to trust in God. He teaches her about being a Christian, as her mother had done, and asks her if she is ready to give her heart to Jesus. After talking with the man, Ellen becomes determined to become a true Christian, which gives her strength for the rest of the journey to her aunt's place in Thirwall.
On Ellen's first night in Thirwall, she learns that her father forgot to inform her aunt that she was coming, so a "Mr. Van Brunt" escorts her to her aunt's home. This aunt, Fortune Emerson, proves to be quite different from Ellen's loving mother: she treats Ellen unkindly and refuses to let her attend school. Ellen hates living with Fortune and comes to find comfort in the society of Mr. Van Brunt and other neighbors as she becomes more familiar with her new surroundings.
One day, discovering that her aunt withheld a letter from Mrs. Montgomery, Ellen runs crying into the woods. There she meets Alice Humphreys, the daughter of a local minister. Alice is kind to Ellen and invites her to tea the next day, to give Ellen a chance to tell her troubles; maybe Alice would be able to help. The girls become fast friends and Alice adopts Ellen as a sister, offering to educate her and guide her spiritually, teaching her to forgive others and trust in the Lord.
Alice and her brother John, who is away at school much of the time, treat Ellen like family, even inviting her to spend Christmas in the nearby town of Ventnor with them and their friends, the Marshmans. While there, Ellen meets another Ellen, Ellen Chauncey. She also gets better acquainted with John Humphreys, who comforts her many times after the other children tease her. Ellen comes to realize that if she hadn't needed to be separated from her mother, she might never have met Alice and John.
About a year later, one day when Ellen visits town, she overhears from some ladies' conversation that her mother has died. Devastated, she turns to Alice and her Bible for comfort. She stays with Alice and John until Aunt Fortune becomes ill and Ellen must look after her. Eventually Aunt Fortune recovers and Ellen returns to Alice and her other friends.
After Mr. Van Brunt's mother dies, he decides to marry Aunt Fortune; soon after, Alice tells Ellen that she is very ill and will soon be "going home" to Heaven; Ellen is not to grieve for her but to trust in God. She also invites Ellen to take her place in the Humphreys household. Ellen immediately moves in and begins by nursing Alice through her final weeks. After Alice dies, Ellen turns to John for guidance. He takes over as her tutor, spiritual advisor, and guiding light. By the time a Humphreys relative dies in England and John must travel overseas to handle the family's business, Ellen (though sad to see him go) is a stronger person.
One day Nancy visits Ellen, bringing letters she has found while cleaning Fortune's house. They are for Ellen from her mother and express the wish that Ellen go live with relatives in Scotland; after sharing the letters with Mr. Humphreys, Ellen decides she must honor her parents' wishes so the Humphreys send her to Scotland to live with the Lindsays: her grandmother and uncle Lindsay and Lady Keith. They welcome her into their home and find her delightful, but they become very possessive of her and force her to denounce her identity as an American and as a Montgomery. Mr. Lindsay even makes Ellen call him “father” and refers to her as his “own little daughter.” The Lindsays also discourage Ellen's faith, as they don't see religion as being important to someone Ellen's age. Ellen finds it hard to live without her daily hours set aside for studying religion, but still tries hard to live by her faith and everything that John and Alice taught her.
Ellen misses John more than anything, and during a New Year's Eve party at the Lindsays', he shows up asking for her. The Lindsays try to keep them apart, but they are unsuccessful. During their emotional reunion John reminds Ellen to keep her faith; in a few years, when she will be able to choose where she lives, she can return to America and live with him. When Ellen introduces John to the Lindsays, they actually become fond of him. John must soon return to America, but not without promising Ellen that they will be together forever soon. In an unpublished chapter at the end of the book, Ellen returns to America as Mrs. John Humphreys.
Primary Characters:
Secondary Characters
This book was originally written with the goal of teaching people a Christian lesson, so many of the themes are Christian in nature and aim to show people how a true Christian ought to live his or her life.
The driving conflict of this story is the separation of Ellen from her mother and the effects of this separation on Ellen, including how she misses the mother who had meant everything to her, how she struggles with being a good Christian, and how she deals with people who don't care about her.
As a work of sentimentalist literature, the conflict created by the story is dealt with almost entirely through the emotional response that Ellen has to the conditions in which she is put in the novel. In this, the main conflicts that Ellen encounters deals with how she can internally deal with each of the emotional problems she is met with in a way that is characteristic of strength and perseverance.
Ellen's mother leaving for France due to her sickness is the conflict which sets the entire narrative in motion, which occurs at the very start of the story. The first few chapters deal with how Ellen prepares to cope with the separation while simultaneously ensuring that, on the advice of the doctor, she refrains from causing any extra stress or fatigue on her mother. After her departure, Ellen must come to terms with being able to survive without the one person who truly cared for her.
With her mother's departure, Ellen finds herself doubting God's intentions, and struggles with the idea that she must love God despite the hardships he has given her, chiefly being separated from her mother, and attempt to come to terms with the idea that God has separated Ellen from her mother and sent her to her aunt in order to be taught that strong faith in God is the most important aspect in her life, over and above her love for her mother.
Most of the personal conflicts with other characters are also dealt with in the internal manner, chiefly the struggles Ellen has in dealing with her callous and uncaring Aunt Fortune, who shows no sympathy for Ellen's sadness in being detached from her mother immediately upon meeting. Aunt Fortune's disregard for the feelings of Ellen leads to most of the external turmoil Ellen faces in the first half of the book, including her indifference to allow Ellen to go to school.
There are three main aspects which created Warner's particular writing style in The Wide, Wide World. The first aspect is the time in which the book was written. With Webster having furthered the development of the American dialect with his 1828 publication of the first American dictionary, America was still gaining its own literary voice in 1850 when The Wide, Wide World was published.
It is readily apparent from the first page that this novel's style is archaic with lines such as "Driven thus to her own resources, Ellen betook herself to the window and sought amusement there." [1]
The next aspect of Warner's style is that The Wide, Wide World is also a didactic piece. Warner's style was aimed at giving an accurate portrayal of the social limitations imposed upon nineteenth-century women, and aimed at promoting the benefits of Christian morality. The Wide, Wide World was republished in 1987 by the Feminist Press, showing the claims it holds to furthering gender equality. And one can see that Warner's style was aimed at promoting Christian morals because one of the main themes of this novel is about finding strength in religious devotion.
The Wide, Wide World is a paradigm of sentimentalist literature. The conflict and action of this story are largely introverted within the protagonist Ellen. The lines “Dressing was sad work to Ellen today; it went on very heavily. Tears dropped into the water as she stooped her head to the basin,” [1] are found in a four-page stretch within which Ellen cries on five separate occasions, displaying how sentimental Warner's style was.
Along with being a piece of sentimentalist literature, the work is considered an example of the domestic novel. The Wide, Wide World adheres to the basic plot of most women's fiction novels of the time, which, as Nina Baym describes the genre in Woman's Fiction, involves "the story of a young girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world.” [1]
"Published at the end of 1850, The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner went through fourteen editions in two years, and may ultimately have been as popular as Uncle Tom's Cabin with 19th-century American readers". [2]
Although it was first rejected by many publishers, Warner's first novel became an instant sensation among its readers. The novel paints an excellent picture of the Victorian era of the United States, and so the readers of the time appreciated its relevancy to their own lives. (Jo March reads the book in Little Women .)
Pushing Christian values and themes, The Wide, Wide World was a guide to young ladies of the time who were encouraged to have submissive and humble attitudes towards their elders, especially men. The novel also portrayed a part of the author's own life: While Ellen's mother died when Ellen was young, Warner's mother had died when Warner was nine years old. Warner then went to live with her aunt, who was much kinder than Ellen's Aunt Fortune. [3]
In 1987, the Feminist Press published a new edition, including the concluding chapter which had been left out by the previous publishers.
Jane Eyre is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman which follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.
The Way of All Flesh is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler that attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy. Written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published posthumously in 1903 it was accepted as part of the general reaction against Victorianism. Butler's first literary executor, R. A. Streatfeild, made substantial changes to Butler's manuscript. The original manuscript was first published in 1964 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, edited by Daniel F. Howard.
Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew.
The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her eighth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine Pictorial Review. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee had initially agreed to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, the judges, in rejecting his book on political grounds, "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'". The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she was already established as a major author in high demand by publishers.
Shirley, A Tale is a social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë, first published in 1849. It was Brontë's second published novel after Jane Eyre. The novel is set in Yorkshire in 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. The novel is set against the backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry.
Ellen Foster is a 1987 novel by American novelist Kaye Gibbons. It was a selection of Oprah's Book Club in October 1997.
Anne of Windy Poplars—published as Anne of Windy Willows in the UK, Australia, and Japan—is an epistolary novel by Canadian author L. M. Montgomery. First published in 1936 by McClelland and Stewart, it details Anne Shirley's experiences while serving as principal of a high school in Summerside, Prince Edward Island over three years. A large portion of the novel is presented through letters Anne writes to her fiancé, Gilbert Blythe. Chronologically, the book is fourth in the series, but it was the seventh book written.
Rainbow Valley (1919) is the seventh book in the chronology of the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery, although it was the fifth book published. While Anne Shirley was the main protagonist of the previous books, this novel focuses more on her six children and their interactions with the children of Anne's new neighbour, Presbyterian minister John Meredith. The work draws heavily on Montgomery's own life in the Leaskdale Manse, where she wrote a large number of books.
Can You Forgive Her? is a novel by Anthony Trollope, first published in serial form in 1864 and 1865. It is the first of six novels in the Palliser series, also known as the Parliamentary Novels.
The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, appeared in four volumes on 8 May 1794 from G. G. and J. Robinson of London. Her fourth and most popular novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho tells of Emily St. Aubert, who suffers misadventures that include the death of her mother and father, supernatural terrors in a gloomy castle, and machinations of an Italian brigand. Often cited as the archetypal Gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho appears prominently in Jane Austen's 1817 novel Northanger Abbey, where an impressionable young woman reader comes to see friends and acquaintances as Gothic villains and victims, with amusing results.
Burnt Offerings is a 1976 American supernatural horror film co-written and directed by Dan Curtis and starring Karen Black, Oliver Reed and Bette Davis, and Lee H. Montgomery, with Eileen Heckart, Burgess Meredith and Anthony James in smaller roles. It is based on the 1973 novel of the same name by Robert Marasco. The plot follows a family who begins to interpersonally dissolve under supernatural forces in a large estate they have rented for the summer.
The Palliser novels are novels written in series by Anthony Trollope. They were more commonly known as the Parliamentary novels prior to their 1974 television dramatisation by the BBC broadcast as The Pallisers. Marketed as "polite literature" during their initial publication, the novels encompass several literary genres including: family saga, bildungsroman, picaresque, as well as satire and parody of Victorian life, and criticism of the English government's predilection for attracting corrupt and corruptible people to power.
Bad Ronald is a 1974 American made-for-television horror thriller film directed by Buzz Kulik and starring Scott Jacoby, Pippa Scott, John Larch, Dabney Coleman and Kim Hunter. It is based on the novel of the same title by Jack Vance.
The Bondwoman's Narrative is a novel by Hannah Crafts who claimed to have escaped from slavery in North Carolina. The manuscript was not authenticated and properly published until 2002. Some scholars believe that the novel was written between 1853 and 1861. It is one of the very first books by an African-American woman, others including the novel Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, published in 1859, and the autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, published in 1861.
Elisabeth Risdon was an English film actress. She appeared in more than 140 films between 1913 and 1952. A beauty in her youth, she usually played in society parts. In later years in films she switched to playing character parts.
Kilmeny of the Orchard is a novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Charlie Chan's Secret is a 1936 American mystery film directed by Gordon Wiles and starring Warner Oland, Henrietta Crosman and Rosina Lawrence. It is the tenth film in Fox's Charlie Chan series featuring Oland as the detective.
Winter is a young adult novel by John Marsden in 2000. Winter, the protagonist of the story, returns to the family estate which she left at the age of four when her parents died. She finds that everything is not as it seems when she visits her parents' graves, and she is determined to uncover the answers.
Mary Hughes, née Mary Robson, was a British children's and Christian literature author.
Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
The Wide, Wide World public domain audiobook at LibriVox