Susan Warner (1) (1819–1885)

This is a sweet treasure of a book. It’s easy to see why it was a runaway best seller back in the day, in an era of Victorian pathos. If you enjoy books about Christian living, you should love this one, with its beautiful writing and realistic characters and setting in a bygone day. This is not historical fiction; its setting seems to be contemporary to the time in which it was written, in the late 19th century.

Ellen Montgomery is a young child living in New York City, with a loving mother and an indifferent father. His wife is the only thing that matters to him, and she is ailing fast. He determines to take her to France for her health and leave the daughter with a half-sister in the country, which decision breaks the hearts of both mother and daughter. Ellen feels as though she’s been thrown out into the wide world, and eventually lands on the stoop of her grim, unmarried relative. Aunt Fortune, who lives with her mother in the country, grudgingly does her duty to her brother.

Ellen finds a friend in the quiet man who manages her aunt’s farm; indeed her innocent longing to please, as she used to have done for her mother, endears her to most everyone she meets. Alice, a young woman who lives on the mountain just a few miles from her aunt, becomes her closest friend and helper. Her happiest hours are spent there in the company of Alice and her family, and here the spiritual growth begun at her mother’s knee is again nourished. Of course, her story, as in real life, has its ups and downs; friends true and false, days happy and sad, character victories and failures, life and death - and life goes on, and we learn or we don’t.

Most of the story is set around Randolph, New York, in a place that encompasses farmland, valleys and mountains. I’ve not been to that area of the state, but after living for a time in upstate New York and skiing the little mountains in the Finger Lakes region, those were the images that came to mind with her descriptions.

Each chapter begins with an epigraph that sets up that section of the story, using selections from Longfellow, Shakespeare, old Scottish ballads, Milton, Burns, Cowper and others, which were a treat in themselves. The book has strange punctuation, with its combinations of commas and dashes.

The prose, though, is beautiful. Here, a picnic with her friends on the mountain: “The moon, meanwhile, rising higher and higher, poured a flood of light through the gap in the woods before them, and stealing among the trees here and there lit up a spot of ground under their deep shadow. The distant picture lay in mazy brightness. All was still, but the ceaseless chirrup of insects, and gentle flapping of leaves; the summer air just touched their cheeks with the lightest breath of a kiss, sweet from distant hay-fields, and nearer pines and hemlocks, and other of nature’s numberless perfume-boxes.”

If you read current Christian fiction authors, for a change of pace, give Elizabeth Wetherell (Susan Warner) a try, and you’ll see why Grace Livingston Hill called her own work (and I’ll add – Janette Oke and those types of writers) as ‘Christian Fiction Light’. Still, because it IS so old-timey, and Christian living IS its theme, it would probably only be enjoyed by those for whom Christianity is a vital part of their life. If that’s you, this charming story will certainly touch your heartstrings.… (más)

Exceeded in popularity in its time only by Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Wide, Wide World is a feminist Huckleberry Finn. First published in 1850, 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 Victorian era."… (más)