SOURCE: Williams, Susan S. “Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship.” American Quarterly 42, no. 4 (December 1990): 565-86.

In the following essay, Williams remarks on Warner's initial resistance to being labeled a sentimental novelist.

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“Sue, I believe if you would try, you could write a story.” Thus, according to her sister Anna, did Susan Warner's Aunt Fanny unceremoniously suggest that she write a novel. Anna then qualified this anecdote: “Whether she added ‘that would sell,’ I am not sure; but of course that was what she meant.”¹ The less pragmatic version of this account appeals to the image of Warner as a sentimental novelist. It seems appropriate to locate the genesis of her authorship in a conversation between aunt and niece that, in its emphasis on success through “trying,” tacitly encodes the virtues of discipline and self-suffering that inform Warner's The Wide, Wide World...