Spinning Sympathy: Orphan Girl Novels and the Sentimental Tradition

The Wide, Wide World (1850), What Katy Did (1873), and Pollyanna (1913) provide a skeleton on which to build a history of the transmission of a women's literary tradition to girls' novels in the early twentieth century. Sympathy, the defining hallmark of sentimentalism, remains an important theme through both traditions, particularly in the ways it limits and ambiguously empowers fictional girls. However, women writing for girls in the decades following the emphasis on sentimentalism repeatedly confronted and revised the terms of sympathy better to suit their audience in a consumer economy.