SOURCE: Quay, Sara E. “Homesickness in Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 18, no. 1 (spring 1999): 39-58.

In the following essay, Quay relates Warner's use of nostalgia and loss in The Wide, Wide World to emerging nineteenth-century middle-class consumerism.

Taken as a whole, Susan Warner's best-selling novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), is about the experience of loss.¹ In fact, the novel might be said to have been generated from the profound loss its author, as a young woman, experienced when her family moved from their home in New York City to an isolated existence on Constitution Island in upstate New York. A result of the family's financial ruin, the move separated Susan Warner from the life she had known to that point.² She wrote in her journal soon afterward: “we have nothing to do with the world. Every human tie … is so broken and fastened...