SOURCE: Trubey, Elizabeth Fekete. “Imagined Revolution: The Female Reader and The Wide, Wide World.” Modern Language Studies 31, no. 2 (fall 2001): 57-74.

In the following essay, Trubey evaluates the portrayal of women's reading in The Wide, Wide World as an instructional but potentially subversive activity.

The act of reading plays an important thematic role throughout Susan Warner's 1850 bestseller, The Wide, Wide World.¹ Ellen Montgomery, the novel's heroine, is often depicted with book in hand, turning to the Bible and other moralizing texts for comfort, edification, and direction. Warner relates Ellen's method of approaching texts, as well as the titles of the works she reads, in extensive detail. Indeed, books and readership are integral to the novel's sentimental message. They teach the young girl morality and Christ-like submission; however, almost counter-intuitively, books also open up for Ellen the possibility of imagined acts of rebellion. In as far as Ellen is a...