Among the many challenges to humanistic study in this country over the past several years, perhaps none has won easier acceptance than the notion that the traditional “canon” of English literature was established, in part, for the purpose of suppressing important works by women. In the face of such a contention, the usual rites of scholarly dispute—example and counterexample, criticism and self-correction—were set aside as those—who leveled the charges took sole possession of the field. Lost in the general retreat, however, was an unasked question. What are these important, undiscovered works? Who are their authors?

To date the strongest candidate for enshrinement in the new counter-canon is the nineteenth-century American novelist Susan Warner. An exact contemporary of Whitman, Melville, and James Russell Lowell and a prolific author of sentimental and religious stories, Warner is the author of an 1850 novel, The Wide, Wide World. Although that book was published the same year as The Scarlet Letter, it was much more widely known than Hawthorne’s in the nineteenth century. Indeed, its popularity was eclipsed only by that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In our own time, The Wide, Wide World was almost completely forgotten until it was rescued from oblivion by a single enterprising critic—Jane Tompkins. Since Tompkins first brought it to the attention of the English Institute in 1983, the novel has been fully rehabilitated and has begun to attract wider notice. Reissued in paperback by the Feminist Press[1]and praised as “energetic and vivid”