Autism and Autonomy in The Wide, Wide World
February 6, 2026
I wish I had read The Wide, Wide World ten years ago. Or at least, I thought I did. An 1850 sentimental coming-of-age story by Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World follows a young girl, Ellen, learning to navigate an often unkind world after her father abruptly sends her to live with her aunt while her ill mother convalesces in Europe. As an autistic woman who was also forced to spend some time away from home as a child, there’s a definite appeal to it. Ellen’s character is deeply, personally relatable, as are her struggles and responses to them. However, this for me is also the book’s weakness. Thinking on it, I think Ellen is actually too relatable in how she responds to her struggles. They're very similar to my responses, and the text doesn't really interrogate how harmful they are. In the end, I must conclude that while this is the book I might have wished for, it’s not the one I needed ten years ago.
Something about Ellen feels almost autistic. In chapter 5 she goes to a store by herself for the first time to pick up some fabrics for her mother. After she goes in, not knowing where she needs to go and finding nobody to speak to, Warner writes, “She felt confused, and almost confounded, by the incessant hum of voices, and moving crowd of strange people all around her… Ellen almost burst into tears. She longed to turn and run out of the store.” For several pages, Warner explains in painstaking detail how busy the store is and how much is going on, combined with constraining language on how overwhelmed Ellen is. The combination of the business and Ellen’s constraining, overwhelming feeling makes me immediately think she’s not just overwhelmed, but overstimulated. “She knew well enough now,” Warner writes, “what it was that made her cheeks burn as they did, and her heart beat as if it would burst its bounds.” Overstimulating like this in public is one of my big fears. The only thing that saves Ellen from crying and running out of the store is being noticed by a clerk at the last second.
The ways Ellen’s peers talk about her particularly shows that something marks Ellen as different. In chapter 27, Ellen is introduced to a group of children by a friend, Ellen Chauncey. As soon as they’re told she’s from the city, they immediately separate themselves from her. A boy in the group, William, does an exaggerated bow in mockery of her, “conscious that he was amusing most of the party”. In chapter 30, his language is much more telling. Ellen is upstairs alone reading her Bible and the children are gathering together for a game of 20 questions. Chauncey goes to get her, but William objects, “No, we don't want her! we've enough without her; she won't play!" She has to be coaxed into it and indeed, doesn’t play. She’s been told not to play on Sunday, it breaks the rules, and that’s that for her, an answer she is all but forced to give, “trembling with the effort she made”. An autistic reader will sadly immediately recognize the exclusionary dynamic here. The pattern of others bonding over making fun of a girl who’s playing wrong is painfully common.
We thus have a girl with a father who abruptly and (in Ellen’s perspective) cruelly sends her off to live with relatives, who’s misunderstood by adults and made fun of by peers, who’s constantly surrounded with religion and inundated with religious rules, and has little safe stability in her life. She’s me! And this is why I wished initially to have had this book 10 years ago, when I had been going through something similar, having just been abruptly sent at a low point in my life to my grandmother’s, largely for the crime of being trans and depressed (I won’t get into too many specifics, but like Ellen’s situation, it was somewhat hostile and thoroughly unpleasant). There is another way Ellen is like me though, and it complicates how I think about this novel.
A silent horror sets in when Ellen starts to resign herself to do what others want of her, mostly without question. Late in chapter 9, when Ellen first arrives at Fortune’s, clearly exhausted, she meets her grandmother, who asks "Will you come round here and give me a kiss, dear?" to which “Ellen submitted.” It’s an interesting choice of words – she submits. Not much emphasis is placed on it, but it’s clear there’s a reluctance she’s choosing not to voice. In chapter 11, after one of the local drivers asks for a kiss from her, she instead runs back home. Fortune, seeing no harm, simply asks Ellen, “Well, why didn't you let him kiss you?" with a tone that “stung Ellen to the very quick.” Ellen gets rather upset with Fortune after this but reasons that it’s because she’s a bad child that she got upset. Ellen had every reason to be mad at Fortune – this is where she starts to really internalize the message that her autonomy doesn’t matter.
It’s a lesson that’s constantly reinforced to her. In chapter 36, Ellen is talking to Alice, who’s become something of a maternal figure to her, about riding. She’s told about the importance of whipping horses, to which she has an understandably strong reaction, saying "Whip him!... I don't want to whip him, I am sure; and I should be afraid to besides." She’s simply asked, “Hasn’t John [a close older friend of hers] taught you that lesson yet?” to which her interlocutor continues “Do you remember, Alice, the chastising he gave that fine black horse of ours…?” Ellen, visibly shaken by this “chastisement,” is told in so many words that what sounds like quite a severe whipping was necessary and proper. (Fellow autistic people may recognize a hyperempathy in Ellen’s response.) Her concerns about it are laughed off, she’s assured that John would never commit such violence unnecessarily, and she concludes simply by asking “Then he did right?," to which the others agree. If she has residual issues with John’s conduct, she doesn’t voice them.
This all culminates in the last few chapters of the book. In chapter 46, letters, concealed by Fortune for several years, are discovered by one of her friends ordering her to Scotland to stay with even more distant relatives. Ellen rides out to some of her friends, who all advise her to obey. She doesn’t want to; upon being told she should she “wept violently, regardless of the caresses and soothing words which her old friend lavished upon her.” Despite the weeping, the adults continue to tell her this will be good for her and that it is her duty to go, to carry out her father’s will. She, reasoning that she can return when she is older and of age, acquiesces. She separates herself from her friends and family and support system again at the behest of her father, dutifully following orders and doing what is asked of her.
This is not a virtue in Ellen; it’s a coping strategy and one that falls apart quickly. She arrives with her uncle in Scotland the following chapter. Her movements and expression are even more controlled; “if her will, by any chance, had run counter to theirs, she would have found it impossible to maintain her ground.” She’s ordered to identify with a Scottish identity and disdain her (US-)American one. Talking about her accomplishments, “Mr. Lindsay and his mother exchanged glances, which Ellen interpreted, ‘Worse and worse;’ they inevitably find some flaw and hound her for it. She’s furthermore ordered to change her name to her uncle’s and told to regard him as her father. Her situation is deteriorating rapidly, but she continues following orders with only cursory protestations.
I recognize Ellen’s strategy well, because it was my coping strategy. Keep your head down, do what you’re told, quietly conform to what’s asked of you while hoping one day you get enough space to make a clean break. There’s a safety that it promises – stay quiet and you won’t be hurt. But it doesn’t really keep Ellen safe, nor did it keep me safe. Acquiescence to an inherently unstable, abusive dynamic is not safety; it’s rather the opposite. Ellen and I kept doing the same thing and our situation kept getting worse and worse.
This is where the novel starts to fall apart for me. It’s incredibly relatable and realistic, but this scene comes at the end of the novel, not the middle. It’s not a situation for Ellen to overcome, it’s where we end the book. Ellen puts her faith in God and in John to solve this for her, and that’s it. An unpublished epilogue has her get out of this situation by marrying John. Again and again, an unexamined pattern of Ellen giving up control, hoping something will change.
My reading above is only one possible reading. Another is that Ellen is genuinely doing the right thing; what she needs to do to survive. I watched a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was in Ellen’s situation. Two episodes from Season 3 particularly stick out in my mind – “Booby Trap” and “The Hunted.” (I remember these as airing back-to-back on the night I got there, but given that these are a few episodes apart they probably didn’t actually air back-to-back.) In “Booby Trap,” the Enterprise is stuck in an ancient trap which is draining their power, keeping them in an asteroid field, and threatening to kill the crew. After several failed attempts to overpower it or outmaneuver the asteroid field, engineer Geordi La Forge proposes that they fire the engines once for momentum and then disable all nonessential systems and manually steer through the field, which works. La Forge concludes that “You know, I've always thought that technology could solve almost any problem… But sometimes you have to turn it all off.” In “The Hunted,” Captain Picard is asked by a society petitioning to join the Federation to assist with recapturing an escaped prisoner. The prisoner is part of a group of supersoldiers who were forcibly interned on a nearby moon for fear that they would have been unable to reintegrate into civilian life. Against assurances that the prison colony is comfortable and has a high quality of life, Picard simply responds, “Prime Minister, even the most comfortable prison is a prison.”
These two quotes seemed to apply equally to my situation. On the one hand having a break from everything was probably genuinely helpful. On the other, it was not a break of my choosing – it was hostile and imposed and the implications were fairly clear. I told my father about the first and kept the second to myself. It seemed to validate what happened, and he was happy. I wonder what I would have read into The Wide, Wide World. Would I have seen Ellen continually fail to apply my strategies as they constantly fail her? Or would I have seen in her validation not just of myself and my struggle, but of my unhealthy strategies? And which reading would I have applied and which would I have kept to myself?
I fear I would have indeed seen too much of myself in Ellen and in this, the novel falls short. The novel presents this situation and it presents Ellen and her struggles, but it never quite interrogates it. The failure of the systems that got her here and her maladaptive strategies are clear to me as an adult reader, but I’m not quite sure I as an adolescent reader, not looking for them, would have seen it. In truth, Ellen and I both needed the same thing – a story of women overpowering the systems that oppress them, of taking back control over their lives, of being shown that we don’t have to live this way. We need stories that grapple with the underlying theory. In this, the sentimentalist falls short.