The Wide, Wide World

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 Victorian era."