First published in 1850 and exceeded in popularity then only by Uncle Tom's Cabin, this domestic epic narrates the seven-year pilgrimage of a girl sent out into the world at age ten by a dying mother and a careless father. Moved from relative to relative, Ellen Montgomery astonishes by remaining faithful to her mother’s memory and to her Christian teachings.

As Jane Tompkins notes in her afterword, Warner's (1819-1865) novel is "compulsively readable, absorbing, and provoking to an extraordinary degree. . . More than any other book of its time, it embodies, uncompromisingly, the values of the Victorian era."