During the first eighteen years of her life, Susan Warner endeavored to master those arts that befitted her station. She studied French and Italian, learned singing and dancing, read from the works of Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Hannah More, and enjoyed evenings out at cotillions and concerts. After Henry Warner suffered tremendous losses during the panic of 1837--the first major economic depression in the United States--the family was forced to sell their St. Mark's Place town house and to retreat to their country home, a Constitution Island farmhouse on the Hudson River. In her time of crisis Warner turned to Christianity for solace.
Prompted by her aunt to earn money by writing a book, Warner drew upon both a serene sense of Christian devotion and the feelings she experienced when her mother died. The result of her efforts, written between 1848 and 1849, was her first novel, The Wide, Wide World. Because Warner was unsure of how her book would be received, she decided to publish under the pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell. Her instincts about the semi-autobiographical tale proved correct: initial reaction to the novel was lukewarm.
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