SOURCE: Schnog, Nancy. “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World.” Genders, no. 4 (spring 1989): 11-25.

In the following essay, Schnog declares that The Wide, Wide World is a complex, psychological portrait of feminine sentiment.

In the past few years Susan Warner's sentimental novel The Wide Wide World, one of nineteenth-century America's most popular novels and the nation's first best-seller, has been at the center of some of the most provocative and detailed discussions of the mechanics and politics of sentimentality.¹ A decade ago, on the margin of this revival, Warner's novel was typically regarded as a subliterary fiction that peddled comfortable dreams and cheerful platitudes to a large and undemanding middle-class readership.² More recently, in the wake of feminist re-evaluations of nineteenth-century women's fiction, scholars have begun to uncover Warner's multivocal handling of social and political themes as well as her positive imaging of female...