SOURCE: "The Other American Renaissance" in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 147-85.

In the following essay, Tompkins assesses the way in which women 's lives in the 1860s play into some recurring elements of sentimental fiction and the sensation novel. She focuses particularly on The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner.

If the tradition of American criticism has not acknowledged the value of Uncle Tom's Cabin, it has paid even less attention to the work of Stowe's contemporaries among the sentimental writers. Although these women wrote from the same perspective that made Uncle Tom's Cabin so successful, and although in the nineteenth century their works were almost equally well-known, their names have been entirely forgotten. The writer I am concerned with in particular is Susan Warner, who was born in the same year as Herman Melville, and whose best-selling novel...