SOURCE: Stewart, Veronica. “Mothering a Female Saint: Susan Warner's Dialogic Role in The Wide, Wide World.” Essays in Literature 22, no. 1 (spring 1995): 59-74.

In the following essay, Stewart compares The Wide, Wide World with John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and asserts that Warner's novel is an allegorical, proto-feminist spiritual journey that confronts the dominant literary and religious ideologies associated with nineteenth-century Anglo-American domesticity.

According to Anna Warner, one of the first reviews of her sister's novel praised The Wide, Wide World (hereafter WWW) as a book “capable of doing more good than any other work, other than the Bible” (344). Unfortunately, twentieth-century scholarship on Susan Warner's unprecedented bestselling novel rarely progresses beyond this oft-quoted Daily Advertiser review, reading both the novel and its author as simple embodiments of the most conservative and religious Victorian ideals (Tompkins, “Afterword” 585-86). Ironically, this limited assessment of the novel and its author emerges out of...