To the Editors:
In bis essay “The Canonization of Susan Warner” (December 1988), I think D. G. Myers made a compelling case against the “canonization” that Jane Tompkins has attempted. I think Myers was greatly mistaken, however, on two other counts.

First, it was unjust of Myers to demolish the weakest chapter in Tompkins’s Sensational Designs without even mentioning her brilliant achievement in other parts of her book. I rank her analysis of Charles Brockden Brown, for example, with the best work ever done on that important writer. And second, Myers was mistaken in his inference that Tompkins misread Warner’s novel because she appears “unable to conceive of religion as anything more than a sham.”

Not only does Tompkins’s chapter on Uncle Tom’s Cabin refute that notion; her life also refutes it. As her colleague for four years now, I have come to admire Jane Tompkins as a doer of the Word. As a weekly routine, she entertains Alzheimer’s patients by singing hymns for them, she serves meals in our city’s United Ministries Soup Kitchen, she solicits money and helping hands for the homeless, and she otherwise makes herself useful to people in need. Although I have never inquired about her degree of orthodoxy, I relate these activities in some sense to the sort of Christian sensibility that she stoutly defends in some sections of Sensational Designs.

Although Mr. Myers cannot be blamed for being in ignorance of his subject’s personal life, I think your magazine