Susan (Bogert) Warner Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Susan (Bogert) Warner

Susan Bogert Warner, who wrote under the pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell, wrote twenty-seven novels, four volumes of biblical history, one biblical study, various religious tracts, a prize-winning essay on patriotism, and, with her sister, Anna Bartlett Warner, two collections of stories and four novels. In addition, the sisters wrote and edited a children's magazine. Susan Warner was certainly prolific, but because much of her tract and magazine writing was published anonymously, scholars may never know the precise number of pieces she wrote. Warner's enormous popularity was unprecedented in American literary history. Her novels, most often referred to as either "sentimental" or "domestic," appealed to her readership for their religious, patriotic, and personal themes. She was, until recently, known by literary scholars primarily as a children's writer and as a local colorist. She has become significant to scholars of women writers for her vast and long-lived appeal to women readers, beginning with her first and most famous novel, The Wide, Wide World (1851).

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