Susan Bogert Warner was an American evangelical writer of religious fiction, children's fiction, and theological works.
Background
Susan Bogert Warner was born in New York City, the daughter of Henry Whiting and Anna (Bartlett) Warner, and a descendant of William Warner who settled in Ipswich, Massachussets, in 1637. She was a precocious child, and from an early age she read widely. Both she and her sister Anna Bartlett were devout Presbyterians from their girlhood. Throughout her youth she was subject to periods of extreme melancholy, and all her life she was, like her heroines, given to frequent and copious weeping.
Career
In the spring of 1848, when the family's economic situation was far from reassuring, at the suggestion of an aunt she undertook to write a story. The result was The Wide, Wide World, on which she worked intermittently until the summer of 1849. During the next few months the novel was rejected by several publishers, but it was finally accepted by George P. Putnam on the recommendation of his mother. It was published at the very end of 1850 under the pseudonym of Elizabeth Wetherell and was well received by most of the reviewers. In less than two years there had been thirteen editions in the United States and several editions, both authorized and pirated, in England. It was included in at least one critic's list of the one hundred best novels in English, and it and Uncle Tom's Cabin were said to be the two most popular novels written in America in the nineteenth century. Its popularity is all the more striking because there are almost no incidents in the entire novel, which describes the moral and religious development of an orphan in her early teens. A second novel, Queechy, begun before the publication of The Wide, Wide World and finished in June 1851, was published in 1852, and was almost as popular as its predecessor. This novel also describes the spiritual and intellectual growth of a girl who has to live in comparative poverty on a farm after living in luxury in New York and abroad. In Queechy, however, there is a romantic theme, though the hero's romance is subordinated to his religious conversion. Susan Warner wrote many other books, but none was so popular as her first two. She wrote many stories for children, both with her sister and alone, and a number of novels, among them Melbourne House (copyright 1864), The Old Helmet (1863), Daisy (1868), Diana (1877), My Desire (1879), Nobody (1882), Stephen, M. D. (1883), and others. Many of her novels were based on real incidents, and it was her intention to portray real life in her stories. There is a certain amount of realism in all her works, especially in her descriptions of rural customs, The source of her popularity, however, seems to have been her sensibility, which equaled that of any of the more extravagant English novelists of the later eighteenth century. It was her description of the emotions of her characters-- emotions that found expression in tears on almost every page--that compensated in the minds of her readers for the absence of action. To this sensibility was added a strong piety, which was revealed both in the interpretation of character and in direct comments and exhortations. From 1837 to 1885 she spent the greater part of her time on Constitution Island, near West Point. She made occasional visits to New York and Boston, and she was acquainted with some of her literary contemporaries, including Julia Ward Howe and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. She died in Highland Falls, N. Y. , in 1885, after an illness of a few days.
