men, I think,” said Mr Halyard, “the American farmers are the most independent, and
the most happy”.’ (For years to come writers were to express the same view.) But Mr
Halyard dies, and Jack has to make his own way in life; we leave him prosperous
enough to buy back the farm. The Happy Family; or Scenes of American Life (1828)
describes with much practical detail a family’s trek over the mountains from
Massachusetts to Ohio. Here they build a log-house and become self-sufficient. Cardell
takes his family beyond this, to the point where they are comfortably wealthy, with a
fine house and a horse and carriage, but for many the log-house and the farm
represented the perfect life, where families could live in harmony and godly simplicity.
Writers often were to use farm life to bring about conversion and a proper sense of
values in spoilt city children. Later examples include Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s
Understood Betsy (1917). Here an over-protected 9-year-old is sent to a Vermont farm
where she becomes, in the words of her relations there, both smart and gritty. In Betsy
Byars’s The Midnight Fox (1968) Tom, initially terrified by even the cows and chickens on
Aunt Millie’s farm, gradually learns to love animals.
The orphan theme was also to be very popular with American authors. Susan Warner
(1819–1885), who wrote what she supposed was Sunday school fiction under the name
of Elizabeth Wetherell, specialised in these. Her first book, The Wide, Wide World (1850),
clearly derives from Sedgwick. It is an immensely long account of the moral development
of an orphan, readable for its descriptions of domestic life. The father is discarded
without regret at an early stage; the mother dies, and Ellen (given to outbursts of stormy
weeping) is brought up and taught domestic skills by her flinty-hearted Aunt Fortune, a
paragon housewife. (There was a similar scenario in A New England Tale.) The book was
very popular with girls; not only was there highly charged emotion, there was also
between 13-year-old Ellen and her spiritual mentor—the young man she calls her
‘brother’—a romantic if not erotic relationship, never hitherto found in a Sunday book.
In Queechy (1852) the author (never good at controlling a plot) succeeds in bringing her
heroine to a nubile age so that she can melt into the arms of a wealthy English
aristocrat. Warner did not often introduce parents into her fiction; but when she did
they could be harsh instruments of oppression as in Melbourne House (1864), where
little Daisy Randolph is the only God-fearing member of a worldly but also cruel family.
The Warner style had a profound effect on Martha Finley (1828–1909), who wrote as
Martha Farquharson. Her Elsie Dinsmore, the first of a long series which went on until
1905, appeared in 1867, and would seem to be modelled on Melbourne House, though
the setting is a never-never-land in the ante-bellum South, where the protagonists, all
plantation owners, live in sumptuous luxury. Apparently disapproving of the freedom
with which Warner heroines allowed themselves to be caressed by male strangers, Finley
keeps it within the family. In the Dinsmore books it is the father (only 17 when he begot
Elsie) who is the lover. He is insanely possessive, violent and tender by turns, and
though he eventually and painfully allows Elsie to marry, readers insisted that the
husband should be shed so that she could return to father.
Orphan stories continued into the twentieth century. In Kate Douglas Wiggin’s
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) the fatherless heroine is sent to live with two
spinster aunts. Her Aunt Miranda is a termagant spinster in the Aunt Fortune mould,
and indeed the book has more than a passing likeness to The Wide, Wide World, though
340 THE FAMILY STORY