The Wide, Wide World, Susan Warner - Sara E. Quay (essay date spring 1999)
Sara E. Quay (essay date spring 1999)
SOURCE: Quay, Sara E. “Homesickness in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 18, no. 1 (spring 1999): 39-58.
[In the following essay, Quay relates Warner's use of nostalgia and loss in The Wide, Wide World to emerging nineteenth-century middle-class consumerism.]
Taken as a whole, Susan Warner's best-selling novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), is about the experience of loss.1 In fact, the novel might be said to have been generated from the profound loss its author, as a young woman, experienced when her family moved from their home in New York City to an isolated existence on Constitution Island in upstate New York. A result of the family's financial ruin, the move separated Susan Warner from the life she had known to that point.2 She wrote in her journal soon afterward: “we have nothing to do with the world. Every...
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