First published in 1850 and exceeded in popularity then only by Uncle Tom's Cabin, this domestic epic narrates the seven-year pilgrimage of a girl sent out into the world at age ten by a dying mother and a careless father. Moved from relative to relative, Ellen Montgomery astonishes by remaining faithful to her mother's memory and to her Christian teachings. In assessing Warner's style in The Wide, Wide World, there are three main aspects which created Warner's particular writing style. The first aspect is the time in which the book was written. With Webster furthering the development of the...

First published in 1850 and exceeded in popularity then only by Uncle Tom's Cabin, this domestic epic narrates the seven-year pilgrimage of a girl sent out into the world at age ten by a dying mother and a careless father. Moved from relative to relative, Ellen Montgomery astonishes by remaining faithful to her mother's memory and to her Christian teachings. As Jane Tompkins notes in her afterword, Warner's (1819-1865) novel is "compulsively readable, absorbing, and provoking to an extraordinary degree. . . More than any other book of its time, it embodies, uncompromisingly, the values of the...