tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Sanctuary was first published in 1903, and is thus only Edith Wharton’s third published fictional work, after the two earlier novellas The Touchstone and The Valley of Decision.

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Sanctuary – critical comment

Structure

The structure of the tale is relatively simple – and is closely connected with what seems to be its principal meanings. The narrative is divided into two parts which are connected by the presence in both of Kate Orme-Peyton. In the first part Kate is presented with a moral dilemma. Her fiancé Denis inherits money from his step-brother Arthur by morally underhand means.

Arthur’s wife and child have been disinherited. Denis has known about the existence of Arthur’s wife all along, and yet he has not revealed the fact at the court proceedings. He is prepared to accept the tainted inheritance, even though he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of Arthur’s wife and child – because the wife has taken their lives in despair.

Denis has looked after his step-brother Arthur (just as Dick will look after Paul) – but he has betrayed him nevertheless, by withholding knowledge of the marriage during the court proceedings. He has also tried to buy off the wife and salve his own conscience by offering her money – which she refuses.

Kate is appalled by this behaviour and what she sees as a lack of moral fibre. She suggests to Denis that he has a duty to own up to the truth publicly and that he should forfeit the money. When he refuses to do so, she ceases to love him and puts the marriage on hold.

But she then conceives of her grand sacrificial scheme. She realizes that Denis is likely to marry somebody else and have a child ‘born to an inheritance of secret weakness, a vice of the moral fibre, as it might be born with some hidden physical taint’. Rather than that, she decides to marry Denis and bring up his child under her own protection.

In the second part of the tale she has therefore raised her son Dick in this self-sacrificing manner, and her husband Denis has proved himself a moral wastrel after all by squandering his inheritance. But she now fears a repetition of the same events, which are directly paralleled in the case of Dick and his close friend Paul Darrow. The friend dies, leaving Dick an inheritance of the architectural designs which could win the competition. These designs have even been passed over to Dick quite willingly, and there is a temptress in the sidelines (Clemence Verney) urging him to profit from this morally dubious act.

His mother is anxious that he will succumb to the temptation, but does nothing to directly interfere. In the end we are asked to believe that his mother’s moral influence prevails – though it is stretching credibility when Dick renounces the prospect of marriage to Clemence only twenty-four hours after becoming engaged to her – and at that point the tale takes on a distinct suggestion of nineteenth century melodrama, with a last-minute resolution to the drama.

A Freudian interpretation

Edith Wharton was over forty when she wrote Sanctuary. She had no children of her own, and her marriage to her husband Teddy was less than satisfactory – but it is difficult to find anything in her private life that would explain or throw light on the extraordinary illustration of the Electra complex which this tale reveals.

Kate Orme is radiantly happy with her fiancé at the start of this tale, but then discovering that he is morally flawed, she rapidly falls out of love with him. Nevertheless, she decides to marry him so that he will not marry and father a child with someone else (from whom he is likely to conceal his moral turpitude). Kate reasons to herself that by taking on his ‘sin’ she can prevent it from being passed on unknown to another generation.

In other words, she embarks upon a path of controlling biologically and psychologically the next generation. We do not have an account of the intervening years, but when Dick Peyton emerges as a young architect on Fifth Avenue, presumably twenty-odd years later, the bond between him and his mother is pitched at a very serious emotional level. She has travelled to France and lived with him during his post-graduate studies at the Beaux-Arts. She wishes to control his actions; she disapproves of his fiancée Clemence and they dispute quite openly over the ability to influence him.

Eventually, Dick reverses his actions and allegiances, and allies himself with his mother – knowing that he is sacrificing his success as an architect and his prospective marriage to Clemence. He is resisting the compromising lure of easy success – for morally good (though scarcely credible) reasons – but the decision ties him even more closely to the mother who has had his destiny in mind before he was even born.

We do not know what happens beyond the text, but by the end of the tale Kate Peyton emerges as a successfully controlling mother figure (with good motives) whose feckless husband is dead and who has a somewhat unhealthily close relationship with her son. It is reasonable to see this as an illustration of the Jocasta complex first proposed by Raymond de Saussure in 1920 – which may be described as ‘different degrees of attachment, including domineering but asexual mother love – something perhaps particularly prevalent with an intelligent son and an absent or weak father figure’.

Form

This is a difficult piece of work to place in terms of literary form. The narrative lacks the range and the social depth of even a short novel, and for that reason it is often categorised as a novella – the story of young woman who discovers ‘the moral sewage that surrounds her’ (Houghton Mifflin). But Kate has made this discovery half way through the tale, and spends its second part making what turns out to be a successful act of resistance to it. She does not learn anything new in the second part of the narrative: she merely hopes that her passive moral stance will prevail – which is does. This is not the shape or the structure of events shared by classic novellas.

It also does not have the densely concentrated complexity of a novella, apart from the similarity of the two ‘inheritances’. And given that the events are stretched over the time scale of two generations, it lacks the temporal unity and the compression of events required by the novella form. Yet it is more ‘shaped’ than simply a long story – and might therefore better be classified as a tale – a form sufficiently elastic to accept anything which is squashed into it. However, others might wish to argue that the structural parallels of the two temptations and the continuity of Kate’s presence constitute the case for it being considered a novella.

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Sanctuary – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Sanctuary – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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Sanctuary – plot synopsis

PART ONE

Part I.   Arthur Peyton has died under dubious circumstances after a long illness, leaving his inheritance to his step-brother Denis, who has been engaged to Kate Orme for two months. Denis arrives to see Kate with the news that a woman claiming to be Arthur’s wife has killed herself and her child, having lost an inheritance claim in court against the family, who denied that Arthur was married.

Part II.   Kate has lived a protected life and now feels that she is facing the grim realities of the world. But when she expresses her sympathetic understanding of the dead woman’s situation to Denis, he reveals that he knew all along that Arthur was married.

Part III.   The woman previously nursed Arthur through his illness, married him, and bore him a child. A lawyer has pursued her claim for inheritance in court, but lost the case. Arthur made over his inheritance to Denis, but no witnesses to this agreement are traceable, and Denis could face jail for misleading the court. Kate feels that Denis is responsible for the deaths of two people and is bitterly disappointed in him.

Part IV.   Denis’s mother visits Kate to pleads his case, based upon the supposition that he is honourable and innocent. Kate feels socially pressured, but feels that she must stand by a decision to postpone the marriage.

When her father returns home from business, he reveals to Kate a similar scandal in another remote part of their family. Kate reflects on the element of corruption lurking beneath the polite surface of life. She then persuades herself that she might expiate Denis’s sin by marrying him – so that he does not pass on his tainted inheritance to some other woman’s child.

PART TWO

Part I.   A generation later Kate’s son Dick is in an architecture practice on Fifth Avenue. Denis has died long ago, after squandering the inheritance. Kate has devoted herself protectively to her son, who she fears might have inherited his father’s weakness of character. Dick has entered an architecture competition along with his industrious friend Paul Darrow. Dick also wishes to impress a female admirer, Clemence Verney.

Part II.   Kate discusses ambition and architecture with Miss Verney at Dick’s office tea party. Then she discusses Miss Verney with the clever but gauche Paul Darrow, who has completed his own competition entry designs. Both of them suspect Miss Verney of being an ambitious social climber.

Part III.   Dick has not completed his competition designs, and is running out of time. Darrow falls ill with pneumonia, and Dick hastens to look after him. Kate feels guilty that she has sacrificed everything for her son, when he now appears to shirking his responsibilities to his chosen profession. But then Darrow dies, and it transpires that he has generously left Dick his own competitions designs to use.

Part IV.   Dick inherits all Darrow’s effects, and decides his own competition plans are not good enough to submit. His mother protests, and asks to see both sets of designs so that they can judge. But he does not comply with her request, and she fears that all her vigilant protection of him will come to nothing.

Part V.   Next day Dick leaves for the office without discussing the matter. Kate fears that his weak character will lead him into the easy temptation of passing off Darrow’s designs as his own. She meets Miss Verney at a concert, where the young woman admits her interest in Dick and her ambition on his behalf. Kate reveals the issue of Darrow’s bequest, but Miss Verney argues that this fully justifies Dick’s appropriation of the designs as his own for the competition.

Part VI.   Two days later Dick decides to dine out, but then his business partner Gill calls at the house looking for him. He phones to Miss Verney’s house, and the conversation reveals to Kate that Dick is using Darrow’s sketches to complete his own competition entry. When Dick arrives home, it is to announce his engagement to Clarence Verney.

Part VII.   Kate feels that Miss Verney has triumphed over her in the struggle for Dick’s conscience.However, Miss Verney has stipulated that the engagement should not be made public until after the competition result has been announced.

Part VIII.   On the eve of the competition judgements Kate goes to the opera, spots Miss Verney, and retreats in defeat. She calls at Dick’s offices on her way home. There he reveals that after a long struggle he has felt his mother’s silent influence prevailing, and has decided to give up the competition – and by implication his engagement to Miss Verney as well.

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Video documentary

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Principal characters

Kate Orme	a young American woman
Denis Peyton	her fiancé
Mrs Peyton	Denis’s mother, the second Mrs Peyton
Arthur Peyton	Denis’s step-brother
Mr Orme	Kate’s father
Dick Peyton	Kate’s son, an architect
Mr Gill	Dick’s partner in business
Clemence Verney	a young American social climber
Paul Darrow	Dick’s friend, also an architect

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Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

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Edith Wharton’s writing

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Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

Souls Belated was first published in the collection of stories The Greater Inclination (1899). It was one of the first of many stories Edith Wharton wrote on the subject of divorce. She did not dissolve her own marriage to her husband Edward (‘Teddy’) Wharton until much later in 1912, but the subject was very much a live social issue at that time. Indeed she wrote a comic version of divorce and its consequences in another story The Other Two published in 1904.

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Souls Belated – critical commentary

The principal irony in Souls Belated is that an American man and his married but not-yet-divorced lover are travelling in Europe where they meet an English couple who are doing the same thing. Not a great deal is made of this parallel except that it emphasises how those people who flout the conventions of upper-class society are forced to move outside it. Both couples are hiding from the censure of their social group in a country where they are not so well known.

Lydia is escaping from the stifling conventions of upper-class New York (which models itself on traditional English snobberies and social distinctions). She thinks these restrictions destroy an individual’s possibility of intimacy with another person. Later, in an apparent volte face, she comes to think that ironically upper-class marriage actually helps people to stay emotionally apart from each other because of the social obligations it entails – ‘children, duties, visits, bores, relations’.

She knows that conventional upper-class marriage is stifling; she wishes to live freely with the man she loves; but she can only do so by staying outside polite society, or by being married to him – because that society will not tolerate any other form of arrangement between individuals. She is unable to find a solution to her dilemma, and that is possibly why the story ends with her problem and her relationship with Ralph Garrett unresolved.

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Souls Belated – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Souls Belated – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Souls Belated – AudioBook format at Gutenberg

Souls Belated – paperback edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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Souls Belated – plot summary

Part I   Lydia Tillotson has been oppressed and bored by her marriage to a very conventional New York businessman, who still lives with his controlling mother. She has fallen in love with Ralph Garrett and left her marriage to live freely with him, away from American society. Whilst in Italy she receives notice that her husband has filed for divorce. Garrett thinks they should follow society’s conventions and get married. She argues that they should preserve the purity of their relationship by remaining single.

Part II   They stay in a hotel in the Italian lakes where social life is very strictly controlled by snobbish upper-class English visitors, notably Lady Susan Condit. The social group within the hotel have already ostracised a newly arrived couple, the Lintons.

Part III   Lydia is approached privately by Mrs Linton, who reveals that she is in fact Mrs Lodge, travelling incognito and carrying on an intrigue with Lord Trevanna. She has guessed that Lydia is in a similar position and threatens to reveal the fact unless she helps her.

Part IV   When Lydia reveals this to Ralph, he informs her that Mrs Cope has just received a message containing what is presumed to be her divorce, and has left the hotel precipitately. Lydia reverses her views and thinks that marriage is a good institution, but only for keeping people apart – because it forces them to busy themselves with social duties. She also argues to Ralph that because she loves him, she needs to leave him.

Part V   Next day she leaves the hotel early in the morning and goes down to the lakeside steamer. Ralph watches her from his room – but she turns back and doesn’t leave.

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Principal characters

Lydia Tillotson	a married American woman
Ralph Gannett	her lover, an American would-be writer
Mr Linton	an English guest at the hotel – actually Lord Travenna (22)
Mrs Linton	an English grande dame guest at the hotel – actually Mrs Cope
Lady Susan Condit	an English social arbiter at the hotel

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first edition – cover design by Berkeley Updike

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

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Video documentary

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Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Angel at the Grave first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in February 1901 and was collected in Edith Wharton’s compilation of short stories Crucial Instances published later the same year. Scribner’s was a New York company which went on to present the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Many of its authors have been Pulitzer Prizewinners – including Edith Wharton herself.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

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The Angel at the Grave – critical commentary

This is a story which is poised very delicately between a tragedy of wasted spirit and a redemptive tale of long-suffering patience finally rewarded. Paulina Anson is a figure of female self-sacrifice. She rejects the early offer of love from Hewlett Winsloe, and chooses to remain at home rather than go to New York. The house which symbolises the life and work of her grandfather starts out as a place of comfort for her, but gradually becomes a living tomb. Even her creative efforts in writing her grandfather’s biography come to nothing, and eventually she feels that her life has been wasted.

The success of the redemptive ending depends a great deal on its credibility. Corby intends to write an article commenting on Anson’s pamphlet on the amphioxus, which demonstrates missing evolutionary links between the invertebrate and the vertebrate world. We are expected to believe that this will restore interest in Anson’s work, possibly make Corby famous, and will validate Paulina’s long-unrewarded dedication to her grandfather. This is rather a lot to ask, and any idea that there might be some romantic link between the two believers (‘she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips’) should be tempered by the observation that Paulina is by this stage of the tale a middle-aged woman and Corby a ‘fresh-eyed sanguine youth’.

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The Angel at the Grave – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Angel at the Grave – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

The Angel at the Grave – eBook format

The Angel at the Grave – hardback edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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The Angel at the Grave – plot summary

Part I   Paulina Anson has grown up in the New England house of her grandfather, a celebrated Transcendentalist philosopher. She is the only member of the family who can read and understand his works. When a young New York scholar visits the house and marriage seems a possibility, she turns him down because she refuses to go to New York.

Part II   She devotes herself to the house and to the memory and work of her grandfather. By the age of forty she has written his definitive biography, but when she takes the manuscript to his publisher they tell her there is no longer any public interest in his work. She then tries to understand how and why her grandfather’s reputation has faded when those of his contemporaries (Emerson and Hawthorne) remain alive. She concludes in despair that both she and her grandfather have wasted their lives.

Part III   Subsequently, she is visited by a young scholar George Corby who wants to write an article on one of Anson’s early anatomical discoveries. When Paulina produces the long-forgotten pamphlet from the archives, Corby is ecstatic. She warns him that she has ruined her life guarding her grandfather’s legacy – but he argues that by staying in the house she has saved from oblivion a work which will now bring his reputation back to life.

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The Angel at the Grave – main characters

Orestes Anson	a New England transcendentalist philosopher
Paulina Anson	his grand-daughter
George Corby	a young researcher
Hewlett Winsloe	a young man and suitor to Paulina

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Edith Wharton’s writing

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

---

Video documentary

---

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

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tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

The Bolted Door first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1908 and was later included in the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910). Edith Wharton was a commercially successful writer of short stories at this period, even though she felt she didn’t reach true maturity as an artist until the production of her novella Ethan Frome written in 1911.

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The Bolted Door – commentary

This is a story that suffers from several serious weaknesses, but has one redeeming and unusual feature. The weaknesses are that it is based on a rather unconvincing idea; it is annoyingly repetitive; the first part of the story has little to do with the second; and the issue in question is technically unresolved.

The idea that someone has committed a murder but is unable to persuade others of his guilt is mildly amusing, but it is never seriously examined or brought to closure. Hubert Granice tells his story to a lawyer, then to a newspaper editor, and finally to someone who purports to be a detective. His tale becomes more complex and fanciful at each telling. In this way, the reader is led to believe that the murder is a product of his imagination. But he never reports to the police, and his account of events is never held up for comparison with any details of the original crime.

The first sections of the story deal with Granice’s failure as a playwright. He has invested time and money in his ambition to become a successful writer for the stage. Despite exploring various dramatic modes – ‘comedy, tragedy, prose and verse’ – he has failed in all of them. We can be forgiven for thinking that his urge to commit suicide is associated with this failure.

But the narrative then changes to focus on his attempts to confess to the murder of his cousin Joseph Lenman – all of which efforts are thwarted. After this point any mention of his theatrical ambition is forgotten – so there is no persuasive or thematic connection between these two elements of the plot.

Instead, the narrative is taken up with a very repetitive and long-winded series of ‘explanations’ which fail to convince a succession of people of his guilt. These are spun out in exhaustive detail, until he is finally persuaded to enter what we take to be a lunatic asylum as someone who is clearly deluded.

At this point his final confessor, the detective McCarren, reveals that he has solved the mystery of the original crime. He claims that Granice really did murder his cousin Joseph Lenman. However, McCarren produces no evidence in support of this assertion. There is no explanation of how he has uncovered the truth, nor is there any confirmation of Granice’s own account of the murder.

The story therefore concludes with producing a sense of irresolution. It becomes a ‘reversal of expectation’ narrative for which there is no justification.

Existentialism

However, there is a very interesting passage in the story which occurrs when Granice’s frustration is at its most intense. He is unable to persuade other people of his account of the murder, and as a consequence he feels trapped within his own anguished consciousness.

Edith Wharton expresses this state of mind in terms very similar to those used by Jean-Paul Sartre in his writing on existentialism which came forty years later – particularly in Nausea (1938). The protagonist of Sartre’s novel, Antoine Roquentin, experiences his own state of being with a feeling of repulsion. Granice’s anguish is expressed in very similar terms:

He was chained to life—a ‘prisoner of consciousness’ … he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable selfness, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any other sensation he had ever known … Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat—and as his brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous substance.

In 1908 modern forms of existentialism were still some way off, so this counts as writing which was prescient, if not prophetic.

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The Bolted Door – study resources

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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The Bolted Door – plot summary

I   Hubert Granice is a failed playwright who entertains the idea of suicide because of his lack of success. He summons his friend the lawyer Ascham to whom he reveals that he committed a murder ten years previously.

II   He reveals to Ascham the story of his rich elderly cousin Joseph Lenman whose hobby was growing melons. Granice poisoned Lenman by injecting cyanide into a melon, but Ascham does not believe his story.

III   Granice repeats his story to Denver, the editor of a newspaper, with further details about how he arranged and carried out the murder. Denver challenges some of the details, and ultimately refuses to print the confession in his newspaper.

IV   Granice takes his tale to Allonby the district attorney, who does nothing, but sends detective Hewson from his office to go over some of the details.

V   Granice employs a reporter McCarren who checks on the car he claims to have used in the murder and a lock-up garage where it has been kept. However, all the evidence has disappeared in the ten years since the crime took place.

VI   Granice discovers that detective Hewson is really a psychiatrist, who advises him to rest and give up smoking. In despair at his lack of progress, Granice decides to confide to a stranger, and on pestering a young girl in Washington Square, he is arrested by the police.

VII   Granice is placed in what appears to be a mental asylum. He enjoys the peace and quiet, and begins writing long accounts of his ‘case’. When visited by McCarren and a friend, it is revealed that McCarren has discovered that Granice was telling the truth all along.

© Roy Johnson 2018

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Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Last Asset first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1904. It was one of many stories Edith Wharton wrote with the subject of divorce in the background. She did not dissolve her own marriage to her husband Edward until much later in 1912, but the topic was very much a live social problem at that time. She had already explored the issue in Souls Belated (1899) and she had produced a comic version of divorce and its consequences in The Other Two published earlier the same year in February 1904.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

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The Last Asset – critical commentary

This is a mildly humorous and bitter-sweet story of social outcasts unscrupulously re-integrating themselves with society via a carefully arranged marriage. Mrs Newell is separated (but not divorced) from a husband who has been impoverished by her extravagance. He lives in down-at-heel seclusion in a sleazy Parisian back street.

She moves between one upper-class group and another, sponging on their generosity. But she has run out of friends, so she uses her daughter as a pawn in a game of social reclamation. She uses Garnett, and he in turn recruits her estranged husband (‘the last asset’) to make sure the marriage takes place.

But Mrs Newell needs a dowry for her daughter who will be married to a French aristocrat. The money is provided by her lover Schenkelderff, who appears to be a Jewish roué, and who also wishes to be accepted into polite society after being excluded from it following a money-lending scandal which ended in someone’s suicide. He is a double outsider, because of his race and his dubious behavior and shady past.

So Garnett is drawn into Mrs Newell’s scheme – as is her long-suffering husband, who ruefully remarks ‘One way or another, my wife always gets what she wants’. Mrs Newell at the end of the story is related by her daughter’s marriage to a French aristocrat with relatives in England – so she is back in the highest echelons of society. But the darker side to this Balzacian view of voracious social climbing is tinged with the mild aura of redemption in Garnett’s vision of the shabby father in his over-sized and rented morning suit, re-united with his beloved daughter, and giving her away at the altar to a man she loves.

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The Last Asset – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Last Asset – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

The Last Asset – Kindle edition

The Last Asset – paperback edition

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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The Last Asset – story synopsis

Part I   Paul Garnett has made the acquaintance of a quasi-philosophic fellow American in a cheap Parisian restaurant. The man preaches a morality of expecting very little in life – and tolerating the consequences.

Part II   Garnett has received a note from Mrs Newell to say that she is at the Ritz. She is a social parasite who lives recklessly at other people’s expense. She also has an undistinguished daughter Hermione who lives very much in her mother’s shadow. Garnett suspects that Mrs Newell might have run out of friends in London.

Part III   When he visits her, Mrs Newell announces that Hermione is to marry a French aristocrat. She wants Garnett to locate her estranged husband and persuade him to attend the marriage ceremony – otherwise the Count’s family will call off the match.

Part IV   At dinner the same evening Garnett feels sure that Baron Schenkelderff (who seems to be Mrs Newell’s lover) has provided the money for Hermione’s dowry. But he thinks the marriage should go ahead because Hermione and her intended Count seem to be simple, well-matched, and in love. So he resolves to find her father.

Part V   Garnett discovers that his friend in the restaurant is Mr Newell, but when told about his estranged wife’s plans he does not want anything to do with the wedding.

Part VI   Garnett reports back to Mrs Newell on his lack of success, and whilst there Hermione asks him not to persuade her father against his will – because of the injustices he has suffered at the hands of his wife (her mother) in the past. But when Garnett reports Hermione’s plea to her father, Mr Newell realises that his daughter’s chance of happiness might be threatened, and he drops his objection.

Part VII   On the day of the marriage all goes according to plan. Garnett at first sees the event as an ugly triumph of manipulation by Mrs Newell, and feels ashamed of the part he has played in her machinations. But then he finally has a very positive vision of the event, seeing Hermione reunited with her father.

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Principal characters

Paul Garnett	an American journalist, London correspondent of the New York Searchlight
Mrs Sam Newell	an extravagant social climber
Hermione Newell	her retiring young daughter
Baron Schenkelderff	a rich roué and money-lender with a shady past
Mr Samuel Newell	an impoverished American businessman, exiled in Paris
Count Louis du Trayas	a French aristocrat with English relatives (23)

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Edith Wharton’s writing

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

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Video documentary

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Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

---

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

---

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Long Run first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly number 109 for February 1912. It was included in Xingu and Other Stories published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1916. It is one of the many stories Edith Wharton wrote on the subject of passion across the boundaries of marriage and the long term consequences of social choices.

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The Long Run – critical commentary

Morals

This is a very successful study in bad faith, self-deception, and lost opportunities. Merrick’s account of falling in love with Paulina Trant is both dramatically convincing and thematically persuasive. He has within himself the potential to expand beyond the confines of polite New York society, and perceives a similar potential within her. Even his first person account of the episode is expressed in charged and lyrically expressive terms:

Love is deeper than friendship, but friendship is a good deal wider. The beauty of our relation was that it included both dimensions. Our thoughts met as naturally as our eyes; it was almost as if we loved each other because we liked each other The quality of a love may be tested by the amount of friendship it contains, and in our case there was no dividing line between loving and liking, no disproportion between them, no barrier against which desire beat in vain or from which thought fell back unsatisfied. Ours was a robust passion that could give an open-eyed account of itself, and not a beautiful madness shrinking away from the proof.

But when he is put to the test by her offer to throw her lot in with his, he retreats into a cowardly and self-justifying moral panic. He claims that he is protecting her honour by not agreeing to a socially rash act, and he retreats into a deeply conservative attitude by pretending that their future will be compromised if they defy social conventions.

She offers a radical and open-hearted alternative which might even release him to develop his full intellectual and spiritual potential – but he persuades himself that he is acting in her best interests by declining the offer. In other words he is a moral coward who hides behind a screen of conventionality – a fundamental weakness which is doubly underscored when he thinks that the sudden death of her husband leaves the coast clear for their marriage.

Narrative

This bad faith and failure in ambition is highlighted by the structure of the narrative. Merrick’s account of events is largely a first-person monologue, but it is preceded by the narrator’s framing of the story by his enthusiastic account of Merrick’s positive qualities in earlier life. But then the narrator is returning to New York after an absence of twelve years, and is shocked to find that Merrick, whilst the same in outward appearance, has changed for the worse.

There was something more fundamental the matter with Merrick, something dreadful, unforeseen, unaccountable; Merrick had grown conventional and dull.

Not only is Merrick changed, so is Paulina – so much so that the narrator does not recognise her. In the final brief episode of the story Merrick sums up what has become of them both – he is a dull and conventional bachelor, she is equally dull and unfulfilled wife. This framing of the essential story intensifies the sense of pathetic loss it enshrines.

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The Long Run – study resources

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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The Long Run – plot summary

Part I.   An un-named narrator returns to New York after twelve years absence and meets his old friend Halston Merrick. He is surprised to find that the previously talented and adventurous Merrick has become rather conventional and dull, having inherited his father’s iron foundry. The narrator is also attracted to Mrs Reardon, a woman of middle years who appears to have been ‘worn down’ by experience.

Part II.   Next weekend the narrator visits Merrick at his country house. The host gives him a volume of volume of writing to examine, but the narrator finds little of merit in his friend’s writing. He thinks Merrick ought to have married, but Merrick explains that he passed up the chance.

Part III.   Merrick gives an extended account of his recent past. He wanted to sell the iron foundry, but didn’t; then he fell passionately in love with Paulina Trant. She has married for convenience, but has retained her brilliance despite her husband’s dullness and conventionality. She and Merrick share a profound friendship and understanding, and a mutual passion. But just at the point he thinks their relationship might be consummated, Mr Trant decides to travel abroad for his health.

Part IV.   Shortly before she is due to leave, Paulina visits Merrick in his house in the country where he has been waiting impatiently for news of her. When she explains that she has come to stay he takes fright and explains that he wishes to protect her virtuous reputation. She is prepared to give up everything: she even explains the advantages of going against social norms in his own case – selling his business, travelling, and being more creative. He argues that it is his duty to protect her against such recklessness, and he urges her to consider what their future would be. She claims that they can invent their own destiny. But he insists that it is his duty not to make such an important decision impulsively, and she realises that he is too weak to take a chance – so she leaves.

Part V.   From this point onwards Merrick plunges into conformity. He doesn’t sell the business, and he has a brief affair with a married woman. Then he convinces himself that Paulina made the reckless offer of herself quite deliberately, so that he could refuse it.

The Trants stay away for two years, and a year later Philip Trant is killed in a railway accident. Merrick thinks he has saved Paulina’s honour and can now claim his reward by marrying her. But when he sets out to make his proposal, he realises the shallowness of his attitude and the bad faith of such a proposal.

Part VI.   Paulina goes on to marry Reardon, and Merrick meets her and her husband as friends – and can measure what has happened in the long term, because he is unhappily single whilst she has settled for a conventional and dull marriage.

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Principal characters

I	an un-named narrator in his 50s
Halston Merrick	his old university friend who inherits an iron foundry
Paulina Reardon	formerly Mrs Trant
Philip Trant	her first husband

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Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

---

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

---

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

---

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Muse’s Tragedy first appeared in the Scribner’s Magazine number 25 for January 1899. The story was included in the first collection of Edith Wharton’s short stories, The Greater Inclination published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1899.

first edition – cover design by Berkeley Updike

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The Muse’s Tragedy – critical commentary

The principal feature of interest in this early story is the manner in which the narrative is composed. It has a remarkably poised structure, and although its is essentially a ‘reversal of expectation’ tale, Wharton brings quite an original approach to the arrangement of events in the narrative – particularly in omitting what would normally be considered a crucial part of the narrative.

In the first two parts of the story events are related from Lewis Danyers’ point of view. We learn of his admiration for the work of Victor Rendle, and his feeling of good fortune on meeting the still-attractive Mary Anerton, the muse of Rendle’s most famous poems. These two elements appear to be successfully fused when at the end of their stay at the Hotel Villa d’Este she persuades him to write a study on Rendle and agrees to help him work on it.

They go to Venice and spend a month together, during which time we learn (later) that Danyers falls in love with Mary Anerton and asks her to marry him. But none of this information is relayed directly. In fact the whole of their stay is omitted from the narrative. Instead, Wharton jumps ahead to the day following its conclusion, and part three of the story is a letter written by Mary explaining to Danyers why she cannot marry him.

The letter explains her past as the muse of Vincent Rendle, her devoted love for him, and her disappointment at not being loved in return. All the earlier information Danyers has gathered seemed to point towards a secret affair between the poet and the woman who inspired his best work. She was after all married to Mr Anerton, who tolerated Rendle’s close relationship with his wife, and even invited him on holiday with them.

But the bitter irony for Mary is that though she worshipped Rendle for fifteen years, her love was not reciprocated, and she is left wondering what it might be like to be loved for herself alone. She has found out during her four weeks with Danyers in Venice, but she feels that although she loves Danyers, she cannot allow him to marry a ‘disappointed woman’.

The letter explains some her earlier behaviour, including her cool reception of Danyers’ essay on Rendle. By the time of receiving the essay, Mary Anerton has become galled by the irony of being viewed as the muse of Rendle’s work – because he has taken the inspiration from her, but offered nothing in return. It also explains why she has been happy to spend a month together with Danyers without once discussing the proposed study of Rendle and his work. By this point she is heartily sick of the work she has inspired. That is her ‘tragedy’.

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The Muse’s Tragedy – study resources

The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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The Muse’s Tragedy – plot summary

Part I.   Lewis Danyers is a young American who has written a prize-winning essay on the poetry of Vincent Rendle, much of whose work has been inspired by his muse, Mrs Mary Anerton. When Danyers’ friend Mrs Memorall reveals that Mary Anerton was her childhood friend, it fires his imagination and his desire to know more about the inspiration for so much great poetry. The public has been kept at bay by Rendle, and even Mary Anerton’s husband has been protective of the association with such a revered artist.

Since the death of both Vincent Rendle and her husband, Mary Anerton has become lonely and introspective. Mrs Memorall thinks she should remarry, but she did not marry Rendle when she had the chance. Danyers republishes his appreciation of Rendle, and Mrs Memorall sends a copy to Mary Anerton, where it receives a polite but cool reception. However, when he meets Mary at the Hotel Villa d’Este, she compliments him warmly on his work.

Part II.   During their stay at the hotel, Danyers gets to know Mary Anerton very well, and he realises that she knows every last detail of Rendle’s work, and also that she has an original intelligence of her own which is reflected in the poetry. May encourages Danyers to write a book on Rendle, which he agrees to if she will help him work on it.

Part III.   They spend a month together in Venice, during which time it becomes obvious that they have fallen in love and he has made her a proposal of marriage. Mary writes Danyers a letter the day after the end of their sojourn explaining why she cannot accept his offer and giving a full explanation of her relationship with Vincent Rendle.

She was in love with Rendle and he was inspired by her – but he only regarded her as a friend. She gave up fifteen years of her life to him and has emerged empty-handed at the end of it. People assumed she was his lover, but this was not true. She has even edited his letters to her, making it appear as if they omitted personal details and references – when there was nothing there in the first place.

He even continued sharing his ideas on poetry with her whilst he was chasing after a young girl in Switzerland. When her husband died, her hopes rose – then fell back again when Rendle merely resumed their old friendship. When Rendle himself dies, she becomes famous as his love object. She goes through black periods and asks herself why Rendle didn’t love her, and wonders if she simply isn’t attractive to men.

This has led up to her month in Venice with Danyers. She was attracted to him and wanted to be loved for herself – not because she was the muse of somebody’s poems. She realises that Danyers loved her for herself, and they spent a month in Venice without even mentioning the proposed book which was the ostensible reason for the vacation. Now, even though she has discovered what it means to be loved, she feels she must renounce him to save Danyers from marrying ‘a disappointed woman’.

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The Muse’s Tragedy – Principal characters

Lewis Danyers	a young scholar
Mrs Mary Anerton	‘Sylvia’, the muse of Vincent Rendle
Mr Anerton	her indulgent husband
Vincent Rendle	a reclusive poet
Mrs Memorall	a friend of Danyers

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Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

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Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Other Two first appeared in Collier’s Weekly in February 1904, and was included in the collection of Edith Wharton’s stories The Descent of Man and Other Stories which was published later the same year. Collier’s Weekly was a very popular illustrated magazine which featured articles on current affairs and high quality fiction on a regular basis. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories were making a big impact on the American public in the same magazine at this time.

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The Other Two – critical commentary

This is an amusing and lightly satirical story in which nobody is seriously harmed, but it rests on a quite serious social phenomenon which was relatively new at the time – easier access to divorce, and the possible consequences. As Waythorn ruefully observes of his wife’s skill in arranging relations between himself and her two ex-husbands – ‘she had discovered the solution of [sic] the newest social problem’.

Alice Waythorn’s first marriage is to a shabby, insignificant man who Waythorn thinks looks like a ‘piano tuner’ and who he regards to be of no social consequence at all. Alice claims that the marriage ended because he was a ‘brute’. But Haskett turns out to be a mild, decent man who has made great personal sacrifices to stay close to his daughter Lily, the daughter who her mother clearly neglects.

Having divorced Haskett, she marries Gus Varick who is more prosperous, and this gives her the social lift she is seeking: ‘Alice Haskett’s remarriage to Gus Varick was a passport to the set whose recognition she coveted’. But after a few years she ditches him in favour of Waythorn – who she treats in a completely dismissive manner. On the very first night under Waythorn’s roof after their honeymoon, she is late for dinner, and she is clearly manipulating him to her own ends. She is in fact a social climber – a type who Edith Wharton went on to analyse in greater detail in the character of her anti-heroine Undine Spragg in the later novel The Custom of the Country.

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The Other Two – study resources

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Other Two – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

The Other Two – paperback edition – Amazon UK

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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The Other Two – plot synopsis

Part I.   Newly married Waythorn is eagerly anticipating a romantic dinner with his new wife Alice when she arrives home with the news that her first husband Mr Haskett wants to assert his visiting right to see Lily, his daughter, who is critically ill.

Part II.   Next day Waythorn encounters Alice’s second husband Gus Varick on the train going in to his office and sees him again in a restaurant at lunch time, savouring a liqueur in his coffee. He wonders if Haskett and Varick ever meet by accident in this way. That evening, after Haskett’s visit, Alice pour him a liqueur in his coffee by mistake.

Part III.   Gus Varick visits Waythorn to negotiate some business, and behaves in a civilized and gentlemanly manner. Waythorn then encounters Haskett visiting Lily and is surprised that he is a shabby, down-at-heel, and rather inoffensive sort of man. He wonders what Alice’s former life when married to him could have been like.

Part IV.   Haskett asks for a change of governess for Lily. Waythorn discovers that Haskett has made big personal sacrifices in order to remain close to his daughter – and that his wife has lied to him about Haskett. Meanwhile, Waythorn continues his amicable business relationship with Gus Varick and they even begin to socialize without difficulty. Waythorn sees his wife as a somewhat promiscuous woman.

Part V.   Waythorn gradually accepts that he only has a ‘share’ in his wife’s life. At first he treats the situation satirically, but then realises that he has the advantages of what Alice has learned from her two previous marriages. Finally, on an occasion when Haskett is visiting Lily, Gus Varick arrives at the same time, and the three men sit smoking cigars, until they are joined by Alice, who serves them all tea.

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Principal characters

Mr Waythorn	a New York businessman (35+)
Mrs Alice Waythorn	his wife, previously married to Mr Haskett and Mr Gus Varick
Lily Haskett	her sickly daughter, who does not appear
Mr Haskett	Lily’s father, Alice’s first husband
Gus Varick	Alice’s second husband
Mr Sellers	Waythorn’s senior business partner

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Video documentary

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

---

Edith Wharton’s writing

---

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

---

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

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Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

---

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Portrait first appeared in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The Greater Inclination and Other Stories published by Charles Scribner’s in 1899. It is one of a numbers of stories Edith Wharton wrote on the relationship between art and life. She published a similar story The Verdict only a few years later.

Leon Riesener – Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

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The Portrait – critical comments

The story is not so much about painting as about Lillo’s empathetic wish to protect Miss Vand’s feelings. He knows he can capture Vand’s villainous character but delays completing the face in the portrait. When confronted by Miss Vand and the incomplete work, he realises that she understands why it has not been finished – because Lillo does not want to reveal to her the corrupt side of a father on whom she dotes.

So he produces an uncritical and lifeless piece of work instead. This explains the mystery raised in the first part of the story – how could a talented painter produce such an unsuccessful piece of work?

In fact the story is split exactly into two in terms of structure. In part one the narrator presents the puzzle of Lillo’s ‘failed’ portrait; then part two is a monologue in which Lillo (acting as a second narrator) reveals the reasons for his having deliberately created a bad painting, which he calls a ‘lucid failure’.

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The Portrait – study resources

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Greater Inclination and Other Stories -Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

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The Portrait – story synopsis

Opinions are divided on the merits of fashionable portrait painter George Lillo: some think he is too negative, others think he is searchingly realistic. His portrait of the notorious Alonzo Vard is considered a puzzling failure. Lillo invites the narrator to dinner, where he explains the provenance of this work.

Lillo has come from Paris to New York in the hope of doing something ‘big’ to establish a critical success. He is impressed by Vard°s dramatic appearance and his scandalous reputation as a powerful man of public affairs. He approaches Vard’s daughter, who worships her father and claims that all his finest qualities are only shown to her at home.

But when Lillo begins the portrait he realises that Vard is in fact shallow and vulgar, with no intellectual substance at all. He begins the portrait but is hesitant to present the truth because he doesn’t want to offend the doting daughter, who protectively attends all her father’s sittings.

Meanwhile Vard is involved in a political scandal which is reported by all the newspapers. On the day the news breaks, the sitting is interrupted by Vard’s secretary, who has arranged for his escape via a back door. Vard refuses to take it and walks out with his daughter on his arm.

There is a trial, and Vard is exonerated. Miss Vard visits the studio and sees the unfinished portrait. Lillo realises that she knows why it is incomplete. Later he feels obliged to finish off the painting in an anodyne manner so as not to offend her. This explains how and why he came to produce such a bad portrait.

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Principal characters

George Lillo	a fashionable portrait painter
I	an un-named narrator – a friend of George Lillo
Alonzo Vard	a dubious businessman
Miss Vard	his devoted daughter

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Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

---

Edith Wharton’s writing

---

Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.

Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.

Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

---

Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

---

Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

---

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Pretext first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine number 44 for August 1908. It was then reprinted in a collection of Edith Wharton’s stories The Hermit and the Wild Woman which was published by Charles Scribner’s later the same year.

cover design by Parish Maxfield

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The Pretext – critical commentary

This is a rather sad, bitter-sweet tale of lost hopes and unfulfilled dreams in which a middle-aged woman is caught up in a doomed romantic liaison with a much younger man. The principal points of interest are the poignant manner in which Margaret Ransom examines her own fading appearance in the light of her awakening passion for Guy Dawnish. She has lived so long in the stiflingly conformist atmosphere of her university town and its conventions that she can hardly believe either in the romantic sensations she is feeling or the very idea that she might be the love object of a much younger man.

When it is time for him to return to England she forestalls any overt declaration of love so as to preserve all its unspoken potential to savour after he has gone. She suspects, and we as readers are given every reason to believe, that he has an undeclared ‘attachment’ back in England. This turns out to be true – but is only confirmed when he breaks off this ‘engagement’ because of the reported ‘significant attachment’ which has occurred during his study visit in America.

The story is given its first ironic twist when his aunt arrives in search of the person who has caused such social havoc by distracting him from his social path – that person being Margaret herself. The aunt simply cannot believe that a middle-aged woman can be the object of her young nephew’s affections.

The story teeters very close to farce as the aunt invents more and more explanations to account for her bewilderment – all resting on mistaken identity. But finally, when Margaret reveals that she is the woman the aunt is looking for, she comes up with the explanation that gives the story it’s name – that Margaret has been used as a pretext to cover Guy’s real love interest.

And this finally is where the story is given its second and most heart-wrenching twist. Margaret is so under-confident that she herself accepts this explanation, not daring to believe that the romantic episode was a reciprocated experience. The story ends with the prospect of her dull suburban life stretching into an indefinite future.

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The Pretext – study resources

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Greater Inclination and Other Stories -Project Gutenberg

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

---

The Pretext – story synopsis

Part I.   Margaret Ransom is the middle-aged wife of a lawyer in a New England university town. She has become romantically excited during the previous two years by her contact with Guy Dawnish, a young visiting Englishman, but she feels the pressure to conform to the Puritan traditions of the town and it’s social norms.

Part II.   Guy Dawnish has left her some personal photographs which emphasise his richly privileged English background. Margaret finds this romantic and fascinating. Dawnish is shortly due to return to England-and they are both invited to a university event where her husband will be speaking.

Part III.   Feeling oppressed by her husband’s speech, she leaves the hall with Guy, and they confront each other romantically in a secluded spot by the river. Not knowing how to deal with the possibilities between them, she urges him not to name or reveal his feelings, but to preserve their unspoken understanding of each other as a potential to help her face the future.

Part IV.   Guy goes back to England and writes polite letters. Margaret lives on her memories of their moments together. Then she hears from a friend visiting England that Guy has broken off a previous ‘understanding’ with an heiress because of an ‘unfortunate attachment’ he has formed during his American sojourn. Margaret regrets that she didn’t catch hold of her chance of happiness when it was presented to her.

Part V.   Margaret tries to busy herself in university social life, but then she is visited by Guy’s forceful aunt Lady Caroline Duckett who has come to America to investigate the person who has caused Guy to give up his engagement and caused such social disruption within his family. The aunt cannot believe that Margaret (as a middle-aged woman) is the person responsible and eventually presumes that Guy has used Margaret’s name as a cover for an attachment to someone else. Margaret is so lacking in self esteem that she accepts this idea herself, and prepares herself for a life with all her romantic hopes extinguished.

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Principal characters

Robert Ransom	university tutor in law
Margaret Ransom	his romantic wife
Guy Dawnish	young English academic visitor
Gwendolen Matcher	Guy’s ‘intended’ in England
Lady Caroline Duckett	Guy’s aunt from England

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first English edition – Macmillan 1908

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Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

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Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount

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Other works by Edith Wharton

The Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.

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The House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.

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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2013

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Edith Wharton – short stories
More on Edith Wharton
More on short stories

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