One of the most widely read American novels of the nineteenth-century, The Wide, Wide World established Susan Warner as the nation's preeminent sentimental novelist. Bearing Warner's pseudonym Elizabeth Wetherell, the novel traces the maturation of a young girl, Ellen Montgomery, from childhood to adolescence. Though generally valued less for its literary merit than for its historical significance, the work is considered one of the earliest examples of the domestic novel—a genre focused on the lives of ordinary women that became extremely fashionable after 1850.