Susan Warner

What She Could (Dodo Press) Susan Warner

Susan Bogert Warner (1819-1885), was an American evangelical writer of religious fiction, children's fiction, and theological works. She wrote, under the name of "Elizabeth Wetherell, " thirty novels, many of which went into multiple editions. However, her first novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), was the most popular. It was translated into several other languages, including: French, German, and Dutch. Other than Uncle Tom's Cabin, it was perhaps the most widely circulated story of American authorship. In the nineteenth-century, critics admired the depictions of rural American life in her early novels. Early twentieth-century critics classified Warner's work as "sentimental" and thus lacking in literary value. In the later twentieth century, feminist critics rediscovered The Wide, Wide World, discussing it as a quintessential domestic novel and focusing on analyzing its portrayal of gender dynamics. Some of her works were written jointly with her younger sister Anna Bartlett Warner, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "Amy Lothrop". Her other works include: Queechy (1852), The Law and the Testimony (1853), The Hills of the Shatemuc (1856), The Old Helmet (1863), and Melbourne House (1864).