With the CDC’s declaration of the Covid 19 pandemic, many of us in the United States have been experiencing an unprecedented isolation as we adjust to new work-from-home schedules (something involving no schedules, or “home schooling while working,” or layoffs). As social distancing turned into social isolation, media outlets ran photo series that showcased the eerie emptiness of New York City. The melancholy absence of people in places designed for throngs makes these photos feel heavy, an embodiment of loneliness that emphasizes the lack of others around us.
These pictures of the feeling of isolation remind me of a once successful New York author who has been lost to history. The maddening inactivity, the representation of silence in the contemporary photos, reminds me of Susan Warner’s double loneliness. Not by her own choice she led a secluded life, which made for debilitating loneliness and silence, a silence that persists into the present. Although she wrote one of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century and then went on to write over thirty more, Susan Warner’s legacy has been largely forgotten.
Susan Warner, born in New York City in 1819 to well-to-do parents, found herself impoverished in what was then considered middle age. For income, she wrote in 1850 the second most successful novel of the 19th century, The Wide, Wide World. This novel was only outsold by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Warner’s novel went through fourteen editions in the first two years of its publication; it sold better than any novel had previously sold. The Wide, Wide World was an immediate popular and critical smash hit. Henry James praised Warner’s novel and it was positively reviewed in The Nation and The Literary Review, while Susan’s journals reflect a deluge of letters received from admiring readers.
The Wide, Wide World is about an orphaned girl who must go live in the country, forsaking her city life as well as her Christian and secular education. The painful drama of Warner’s personal experiences likely inspired her novel. She wrote The Wide, Wide World out of financial desperation after her lawyer father lost his wealth in the financial panic of 1838. The socially elite family had to move from their posh Manhattan townhouse into their country home on Constitution Island, where they were destitute. In her journal, Susan grimly writes that her family cannot afford oil, that they have little food, and they lack the money to buy cloaks and bonnets for the freezing winter.
The refrains of loneliness, taxed nerves, and exhaustion continue throughout Susan’s journal entries. Although she loved society and meeting new people, she and her family had become social pariahs. In that era, the loss of fine dresses guaranteed the loss of social calls. Susan detests being “locked up for the winter”. She writes of the “depressing effect” of going to church on the island, “walking through the people, through such a heyday of life…yet not touching it. We go in and come out, and the effect rather is that we have nothing to do with the world. Every human tie, beyond our quartette, is so broken” (332-333). Not only was Susan waterlocked on the Island where she was dependent on her own rowing to get to the city, but her family’s financial downfall made her socially outcast.
Susan and her sister Anna turned to writing to make money; in 1848 Susan began work on The Wide, Wide World. By 1852 the sisters were the breadwinners of their family. Although their income allowed them to eventually rent winter boarding in the city, their situation was still financially precarious. Susan had to sell the copyrights on her work because she was so desperate for money. We can hear her desperation when she asks “We are not here and alone without some real purpose to be answered- some real good to be gained- what is that?....I feel the isolation and the loneliness to be great indeed” (459).
Susan died in her home in 1885, at the age of 64. While today’s layperson might have heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and likely knows of 19th century authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne or Mark Twain, Susan Warner’s name and novel are not familiar. This silence is largely due to the institutional canonization of American literature in the early 20th century. When we think of great American literature from the 1800’s, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emily Dickinson, a lone woman, may come to mind. But had you heard of Susan Warner before reading this short biography?
Her journals reflect an aching desire for company and conversation that is the obvious effect of being socially outcast. We in the 21st century have cast out Susan, as her memory does not live on in American public consciousness. It seems tragic that knowledge of her and her work has been confined to her life time. By letting her become distant from our moment, we lose an opportunity to see how gender, race, and class determine inclusion in the literary canon. We also lose insight into the timelessness of loneliness at a moment when we’re experiencing solitude and anxiety.
Due to the mandates that all non-essential businesses close in the face of the Covid 19 pandemic, many journals and organizations are offering temporary free access. If we have the time, the opportunity awaits for us to learn more about the literary greats who have been omitted from the literary canon and public knowledge. The journal of nineteenth century America J19, for example, has made its content free through June 30th. Atelier Ideas and Research has created “Maps, globes, and plans: an ongoing census of free digital archives.” Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life offers Just Teach One, a series of forgotten or neglected early American manuscripts with accompanying historical context and scholarly preface. There you can find writings by unknown authors such as Sarah Savage and lesser known authors such as Frances E. Watkins Harper. Hathi Trust, a free online digital library, provides access to titles by authors who are little known now but who were famous in their day: Sui Sin Far, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Winnemucca, Harriet Wilson, Rebecca Harding, and Elizabeth Stoddard.
Women authors like Susan Warner were prolific, and many of them ruled the literary marketplace in the nineteenth century but are now completely forgotten. Our temporary isolation has given us the opportunity to refasten the broken ties between these famous, prolific authors of the past and our own lonely moment.
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