"Mamma" Daisy seemed to be engaged on a very puzzling question "what does it mean to be a Christian?" "What?" said her mother, rousing herself up for the first times to look at her. "To be a Christian, mamma?" "It means, to be baptised and go to church, and all that," said the lady, turning back to her book. "But mamma, that isn't all I mean." "I don't know what you mean. What has put it into your head?" "Something Mr. Dinwiddie said." "What absurd nonsense! Who is Mr. Dinwiddie?" "You know him. He lives at Mrs. Sandford's." "And where did he talk to you?" "In the little school in the woods. In his Sunday-school. Yesterday." "Well, it's absurd nonsense, your going there. You have nothing to do with such things. Mr. Randolph? " An inarticulate sound, testifying that he was attending, came from a gentleman who had lounged in and was lounging through the room. "I won't have Daisy go to that Sunday-school any more, down there in the woods. Just tell her she is not to do it, will you? She is getting her head full of the most absurd nonsense. Daisy is just the child to be ruined by it." Susan Warner is the first author to sell one million copies for a single title of work, the title of which was Wide, Wide, World.

Author Biography

Susan Bogert Warner, pen name Elizabeth Wetherell (1819 - 1885), was an American evangelical writer of religious fiction, children's fiction and theological works. She is best remembered for The Wide, Wide World. Her other works include Queechy, The Hills of Shatemuck, Melbourne House, Daisy, Walks from Eden, House of Israel, What She Could, Opportunities and House in Town. Warner and her sister, Anna, wrote a series of semi-religious novels which had extraordinary sale, including Say and Seal, Christmas Stocking, Books of Blessing, 8 vols., The Law and the Testimony. She wrote, under the name of "Elizabeth Wetherell," thirty novels, many of which went into multiple editions. However, her first novel, The Wide, Wide World (1850), was the most popular. It was translated into several other languages, including French, German and Dutch. Other than Uncle Tom's Cabin, it was perhaps the most widely circulated story of American authorship. Other works include Queechy (1852), The Law and the Testimony, (1853), The Hills of the Shatemuc, (1856), The Old Helmet (1863) and Melbourne House (1864). In the nineteenth century, critics admired the depictions of rural American life in her early novels. American reviewers also praised Warner's Christian and moral teachings, while London reviewers tended not to favor her didacticism. In the later twentieth century, feminist critics rediscovered The Wide, Wide World, discussing it as a quintessential domestic novel and focusing on analyzing its portrayal of gender dynamics.