SOURCE: Baym, Nina. “Susan Warner, Anna Warner, and Maria Cummins.” Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870, pp. 140-74. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.

In the following excerpt, Baym investigates domestic fiction's emphasis on a woman's ability and responsibility for attaining religious grace by dutiful self-sacrifice, as demonstrated both in The Lamplighter, about an orphan's spiritual rise above her volatile temperament, and in Mabel Vaughan, about an heiress' fall from the superficialities inherent in her life of wealth.

The most successful imitation (in Harold Bloom's sense, misreading) of The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter (1854) was both more benign in its vision of society and more social in its ideology. It would appear that the author, Maria Susanna Cummins, had grasped the antisocial implications of Susan Warner's view of life and striven to rectify them. Author of four novels all anonymously published (though their...