SOURCE: Bauermeister, Erika R. “The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide World, and Hope Leslie: Reconsidering the Recipes for Nineteenth-Century American Women's Novels.” Legacy 8, no. 1 (spring 1991): 17-28.

In the following essay, Bauermeister asserts that Cummins's The Lamplighter pales in comparison to the cultural and ethical complexity of Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World. The critic also suggests that The Lamplighter's ethical system and emphasis on female independence is better understood when compared to Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.

For a variety of reasons, the critical work on American women novelists prior to 1860 has had a tendency toward generalization. Critics of the mid-twentieth century, including Fred Lewis Pattee, James D. Hart, Carl Van Doren, Henry Nash Smith, Alexander Cowie and Herbert Ross Brown, use vaguely defined terms such as “sentimental” and/or “domestic” to classify and then dismiss large numbers of women authors. Cowie, in fact, goes so far as...