Susan (Bogert) Warner Biography

Susan (Bogert) Warner (11 July 1819-17 March 1885), prolific novelist, is remembered today as the author of a single best-seller, The Wide, Wide World. Indeed, the publishing history of that book rivals its interest as a literary production. It was an outgrowth of Warner's own economic and emotional needs, and its writing made of her a professional. Born in New York City, the daughter of a prosperous lawyer, Henry Whiting Warner, and Anna Bartlett, she lost her mother early, and she and her younger sister, Anna Bartlett Warner (1827-1915), were reared by an aunt. Educated privately in the classics, music, Italian, literature, and history, she alternated her studies with periods of weeping and melancholy. Her father was impoverished by the Panic of 1837, and the family subsequently resided permanently on Constitution Island, opposite West Point, where he purchased a summer home. Between menial domestic chores Warner turned to writing to help support the family. Her first novel, sentimental in style, domestic in genre, related the trials and tribulations of a motherless girl who achieved the Christian virtues against a rural background. The tale of this "desolate child tossed out upon" "the wide, wide world" became a phenomenon of publishing history and a best-selling novel. Written between 1848 and 1849, the manuscript was submitted early in 1850, without success, to a number of publishing houses including Harpers, whose reader's comment was the monosyllabic "Fudge." Finally it reached G. P. Putnam of New York. According to Putnam's son George Haven Putnam: "The report given on 'The Wide, Wide World' ... was not encouraging. The narrative was described as 'pleasantly written, with good character studies ... wholesome in purpose and earnest in its religious feeling; but ... not dramatic, and ... in no way sensational, and ... very long.'" Before rejecting it, however, Putnam showed the manuscript to his mother, who exclaimed, "George, if you never publish another book, you must make 'The Wide, Wide World' available for your fellow-men." What Mrs. Putnam had seen in the book was doubtless what hosts of her fellow-men and fellow-women would eventually see in it: vivid characterizations that transcended the monotonous goodness of the heroine Ellen Montgomery; a graphic description of American farm life; the power to evoke tears in deluge--as one contemporary would remark, "No living writer ...

knows better how to open the fountain of tears, or goes more directly to the heart of the reader"; and finally, the merging of what a more recent critic, Grace Overmyer, has called "worldly success and divine grace" to produce "a cosmic success story." Putnam heeded his mother's advice. The author was invited to his home on Staten Island where she read the proofs, and in December 1850 (with a title page dated 1851) The Wide, Wide World by "Elizabeth Wetherell," Warner's pseudonym, was published in two volumes, priced at $1.50. It was not an immediate success. However, Mrs. Putnam had commented that, whatever difficulties might be involved in its publication, "Providence will take care of this book." Providence did, an order for forty sets arriving shortly from the Baptist Sunday School in that city. Theological reviewers were enthusiastic, finding that The Wide, Wide World expressed "Christianity as a fact of experience." According to the Christian Review, the novel succeeded "better than any other ... in our language in making religious sentiment appear natural and attractive, in a story that possesses the interest of romance." Literary reviewers followed suit. The Newark Daily Advertiser concluded that "The Wide, Wide World is capable of doing more good than any other work, other than the Bible," and the North American Review later remarked of Warner's first two books: "We know not where, in any language, we shall find their graphic truth excelled." According to a contemporary analyst: "Readers very soon began to multiply; every one who read the book, talked about it, and urged its reading upon his neighbours, until, within a year ... it had reached a circulation then considered almost unprecedented." Actually the novel went through thirteen printings in two years. Its title was used as a phrase for advertisers who boasted "In the 'Wide, Wide World' cannot be found better undergarments." A deluxe edition priced at six dollars appeared in 1854. After expiration of copyright in 1892, cheap fifty-cent editions were made available. By 1947 The Wide, Wide World had sold over half a million copies in the United States. Meanwhile in England authorized and unauthorized editions swelled the sales. The novel, whose publishing history is comparable with that of Little Women, retained its interest for readers well into the twentieth century. In 1927 the distinguished critic George Saintsbury recalled it with pleasure, and it has recently been described as "the first of the best-selling domestic novels for women." Unfortunately the author received but scant profit from the sales of her bestselling novel. Her need for immediate cash forced her to sell her copyrights outright and forego royalty payments. Moreover, outside of a single advance from a British publisher, she received nothing from the thousands of copies sold abroad. Robert Carter of New York, who published many of Warner's later novels, was said to have "lived the religion he professed" and been "a true, honest man," liberal to authors in his contracts, but Warner's later stories never attained the success of her first. She capitalized upon her initial popularity with Queechy , a more or less repeat performance, in 1852, and she followed Queechy with a succession of sentimental, religious, and moral double-decker novels and sequels, including a five-volume collection of stories written with her sister Anna entitled Ellen Montgomery's Book Shelf. Every year one or two novels flowed from her tireless pen until in 1885, the prolific author died at Highland Falls, New York. In The Wide, Wide World she introduced the sentimental domestic novel to a public avid for her blend of tears, religion, and everyday life, and produced a story that vied in popularity with Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Women, and became a phenomenon in publishing history.