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After Holbein

November 18, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

After Holbein first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1928. It was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Certain People published in 1930.

After Holbein

Danse Macabre


After Holbein – critical comments

The surprising thing about this story is the very fine balance between sympathy and satire in Edith Wharton’s presentation of its two principal characters. There is obviously a critical edge to her depiction of Anson Warley’s naive drift into the perils of old age and Mrs Jasper’s other-wordly existence in the twilight zone of dementia. Both of them are clearly deluded characters. Yet at the same time she is neither cruel nor lacking in sympathy for their plight.

Mrs Jasper is fairly close to a Dickensian character: she has a black wig tinged with purple, and orthopaedic shoes, and she has clearly lost touch with reality – but the characterisation is not calculated to make her look either ridiculous or pathetic. Similarly Anson Warley is presented as a dreamer, sleepwalking into the perils of old age and death.

Servants

It is interesting to note that both of these principal characters are supported by servants who appear to have a genuine concern for their wellbeing. Warley has his valet/manservant Filmore who tries without success to prevent him from going out or exposing himself to health dangers; and Mrs Jasper has Lavinia, a family servant who seems to be almost as old as herself, and whose chief concern is to protect her mistress from embarrassment and exposure to problems.

Also of note is the financial dependence of some of the servants. Miss Cress has every reason to keep Mrs Jasper happy, because her job depends upon it. And she imputes similar sympathetic views to Lavinia as they deal with the issue of the ageing (and absent) butler Munson

and all because poor old Munson’s memory was going, like his mistress’s, like Lavinia’s, and because he had forgotten it was one of the dinner nights … the tears were running down Lavinia’s cheeks, and Miss Cress knew she was thinking “If the daughters send him off—and they will—where’s he going to, old and deaf as he is, and all his people dead? Oh if only he can hold on until she dies, and get his pension …”

Structure

There is a very well organised structure to the story. Two characters. Anson Warley and Mrs Jasper, are preparing themselves for a dinner party later in the evening. They both have servants who help them dress. Both of them have had strokes and are losing touch with the real world. Both of them think they are being harassed or deceived by the people around them. And they are preparing for a dinner which is not scheduled to take place – but which does.

Warley has forgotten where he is supposed to be going. Mrs Jasper only has imaginary dinner parties. Yet because of ancient social connections between them he ends up being an uninvited guest at her house, and they dine together in sublime ignorance of the fact that nobody else is there.

Part of the humour in the story is created by the disparate cultural references which emphasise the differences between the time frame in which the characters are living imaginatively and that in which they actually exist. When Warley goes out his reflections are linked to the real world Manhattan where he lives:

The doctors, poor fools, called it the stomach, or high blood-pressure; but it was only the dizzy plunge of the sands in the hour glass, the everlasting plunge that emptied one of heart and bowels, like the drop of an elevator from the top of a sky-scraper.

In contrast, when the imaginary dinner party is about to begin, Mrs Jasper thinks she hears horse drawn carriages arriving – a clear reference to the nineteenth century which she still inhabits.


After Holbein – study resources

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

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

After Holbein Edith Wharton Stories 1911-1937 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

After Holbein Edith Wharton Stories 1911-1937 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

After Holbein - eBook edition After Holbein – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

After Holbein


After Holbein – story synopsis

Part I.   Anson Warley is an ageing New York bachelor who once had high cultural aspirations, but he has left them behind to give himself up to the life of a socialite and dandy.

Part II.   Despite signs that his health is failing, he chooses to dine out nightly, ignoring the cautions of his manservant Filmore. On the morning of the story he has had a minor stroke which has left him looking pale through lunch, but he is determined to go out to dinner with a few friends.

Part III.   Meanwhile Mrs Evelyn Jasper, a society hostess, is preparing to dress for an elaborate dinner. She is an elderly woman who wears a black wig and orthopaedic shoes. She is suffering from a form of dementia following a stroke, and is protected from reality by an equally old servant who is a family retainer. She imagines guests are arriving in carriages and recites a list of their names, including some who are already dead. Her jewellery is recovered from a safe, and she goes down to the dining room.

Part IV.   Displaying signs of confusion, Anson Warley dresses for dinner and refutes Filmore’s warnings about the night being cold. Once out on Fifth Avenue he suddenly realises that he doesn’t know where he is dining. Mrs Jasper enters his thoughts as he just happens to be passing her house – so he assumes that is where he is supposed to be going.

Part V.   As Anson Warley arrives at the house the staff are appalled at the social embarrassment likely to ensue. Warley has not been invited; there are no other guests; and the staff are worried that the shock might be fatal to Mrs Jasper.

But Mrs Jasper comes into the dining room supporting Warley on her arm and they dine as if everything were normal, exchanging formulaic conversation, and as if they were surrounded by other guests. The footman George serves mediocre food and passes spa water off as wine. At the end of the dinner Mrs Jasper invites Warley to join her after he has had cigars with the other male guests.

Part VI.   Warley’s temperature has been rising all day. Leaving the house, he struggles to get into his coat, and he thinks he is ‘going on’ to some other social event. However, as soon as the cold night air hits him, he dies on the pavement.


After Holbein

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount


Principal characters
Anson Warley an ‘ageing’ (63) New York bachelor
Filmore his valet and manservant
Mrs Evelyn Jasper an elderly society hostess with dementia
Lavinia her aged servant
Miss Cress her young nurse

After Holbein

first edition


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

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth 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.

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


Filed Under: Wharton - Stories Tagged With: Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story

Afterward

January 31, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Afterward was first published in The Century Magazine for January 1910, and was then reprinted in the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts published later the same year. It was one of a number of ghost stories written by Edith Wharton. The genre was very popular at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

Afterward


Afterward – critical commentary

It is very difficult to analyse or pass critical comment on a ghost story – unless one takes the supernatural premise seriously – for which in this case there seems to be little incentive provided. Edward and Mary Boyne have profited handsomely from the Blue Star Mine venture, and they have a naively romantic notion to retire to a fashionably old English country estate, where the house is so traditional they hope it will be haunted. The opening of the story is pitched at a mildly satirical level, poking gentle fun at their enthusiasm for a home with no heating or electric lighting.

But they have made their money by enduring ‘for fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West’. The windfall fortune has now made that sacrifice worthwhile. Edward Boyne has profited from America’s system of individual enterprise and free market capitalism, and he can now afford to turn his back on it.

But he has profited at the expense of his colleague Robert Elwell, who introduced Boyne to the Blue Star venture in the first place. Elwell has borrowed money to put into the scheme, but then lost it when Boyne ‘got ahead’ of him in business. Elwell has tried to commit suicide, then has died shortly afterwards, leaving his wife destitute.

Edward Boyne moves to the old house in Dorset and almost immediately begins to behave strangely. When Elwell makes his two ‘visits’ to the house, Boyne recognises his figure on both occasions. The first occurs on the day he attempts suicide, and the second is on the day he dies (in America). Elwell therefore acts as the embodiment of Boyne’s guilty conscience over his dubious business dealings regarding the Blue Star Mine.

This does not explain how or why he disappears, but at least it provides a psychological underpinning to the story, which as a matter of fact might well have a second ‘disappearance’ – that of Mary Boyne herself.

The story begins with Mary in the library at the house in Lyng, recalling to herself the events that have led up to the disappearance of her husband. This gives the impression that hers is the controlling perspective and point of view in the narrative – and that (logically) she is still alive in order to recount the entire story, which is unfolding retrospectively. But the tale also ends with her in the library, receiving the gruesome news from Parvis about the attempted suicide and subsequent death of Elwell. She realises that she has directed the supernatural Elwell to her husband in the same room, and the shock appears to kill her.

She felt the walls of the room rush towards her, like inward falling ruins, and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

“You won’t know till afterward” it said. “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”

If this is the case, it is a neat technical achievement on Edith Wharton’s part – because she has created a narrative which ends with the death of the person from whose point of view the story is being told.


Afterward – study resources

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

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

Afterward - eBook edition Afterward – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Afterward - eBook edition Afterward – AudioBook format at librivox

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Afterward


Afterward – story synopsis

Part I.   Americans Edward and Mary Boyne make a lot of money in the Blue Star Mine venture and decide to live in England. They choose an old country house in Dorset which they hope will have its own authentic residential ghost. Their English cousin Alida Stair reassures them that there is a ghost, but they won’t know about it. Ned Boyne hopes to write a book on economics and culture, but he seems out of sorts to his wife. She thinks it might be the influence of the haunted house, but since no ghost has ever been seen, this notion cannot be verified.

She locates a concealed panel which provides access to the roof, from where she and Ned see a figure approaching the house. Ned goes down to meet him, but when Mary follows them the man is no longer there. Ned gives her an explanation, but appears to be disturbed.

Part II.   Two months later she thinks she sees the same figure again – but it turns out to be her husband, whose moods appear to change in a disconcerting manner. A letter then arrives announcing legal threats brought against Ned and his dealings with the Blue Star Mine by his former partner Robert Elwell. But Edward reassures Mary that the matters in the letter have now been settled.

Part III.   Next day Mary feels completely reassured and she enjoys a proprietary stroll in the grounds, where she meets a young man who has come to see Ned. Since Ned is busy, he says he will come back again later. But when Mary goes in to lunch Ned is missing. The servants report that he has gone out with the young man. Mary interrogates the staff, but they know nothing about the stranger, except that he was wearing a strange hat.

Part IV.   Two weeks later Ned has still not reappeared and has left behind a fragment of a letter to a Mr Parvis relating to the legal dispute over the Mine. Mary makes extensive enquiries, but there is no trace of Ned. She gradually adjusts to the fact that he may not be coming back.

Part V.   Mr Parvis arrives from the USA to explain that Ned’s partner Robert Elwell lost money in the Mine venture and has died following an attempt to commit suicide. His widow has fallen on hard times. Parvis shows Mary a newspaper clipping which reveals a photograph of the young man who twice called at the house. Mary calculates that the first visit took place at the same time as his attempted suicide and the second later visit was at the time he actually died. The last words she recalls are those of her cousin warning her that “You won’t know [about the ghost] till long, long afterward.”


Principal characters
Edward (Ned) Boyne an American mining engineer
Mary Boyne his wife
Mrs Alida Stair their cousin and friend in England
Trimmle a parlour-maid
Robert (Bob) Elwell Boyne’s business partner in the mine
Parvis a lawyer from Waukesha (WI)

Video documentary


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


Afterward

Edith Wharton’s writing


Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth 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.

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


Filed Under: Wharton - Stories Tagged With: Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story

Autres Temps

November 19, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Autres Temps first appeared in the Century Magazine in July— 1911. It was originally published under a different (and more obvious) title of Other Times, Other Manners. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Xingu published in 1916.

Autres Temps


Autres Temps – critical commentary

Europe and America

The story has elements of what Edith Wharton’s friend and fellow author Henry James called the ‘International Theme’. Although Autres Temps is not concerned with tensions between Europe and America, it is significant that the geographic axis of the story is Florence in Italy and New York in America.

Mrs Lidcote has retreated to live in Europe following her own social disgrace, which we are led to believe is a marital rupture and elopement with another man. She has been forced into this dis-location because of the social opprobrium her actions have brought upon her in very conservative nineteenth century American upper-class society.

It was very common for people in America and England to retreat to the more tolerant locations of European cities following any sort of scandal or disgrace – or even for reasons of financial hardship. As late as 1897 Oscar Wilde had fled Britain to live in France following his trial and imprisonment following his failed libel case against the Marquis of Queensbury.

Mrs Lidcote is confronted with the manners and morals of the ‘new’ New York after exposure to her daughter and friends, rather than the ‘old’ New York in which she had been raised. Symbolically, she retreats to Florence where she can at least be sure of consistency.

It is worth noting that her retreat is not caused by any shock she feels at their apparently laissez faire attitude to divorce and re-marriage, but because they have embraced their own new freedoms without examining or calling into question examples of censure in the past. As she puts it very pithily – ‘society is much too busy to revise its own judgements’.

What has she done?

Mrs Lidcote has been living in exile in Florence for eighteen years, ostracised by fashionable New York society because of a former indiscretion. So what exactly did she do? The text does not make this entirely explicit – but there are certain clues.

First, she fears that Leila might make the same mistake that she made. Leila has divorced one husband an married another. In Mrs Lidcote’s eyes she has gambled her social reputation for the sake of personal happiness – which is what we take it Mrs Lidcote did.

But Mrs Lidcote still has her married name, from which we can infer that she left her husband for another man – but did not get married to him. Furthermore, she mentions how social ostracism can have very damaging consequences:

She had had what she wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it. She had had to pay the last bitterest price of learning that love has a price: that it is worth so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she loved discover this first, and of reading the discovery in his eyes.

Since these events were ‘a long time past’ and it appears that she has been living alone in Florence, there is an inference that her lover capitulated to social convention and abandoned their relationship, leaving her doubly isolated.

These were all live issues for Edith Wharton herself. She had begun an affair with Times correspondent W. Morton Fullerton in 1908, moved to live in France in 1911 (the same year at Autres Temps was published) and divorced her husband Edward (Teddy) Wharton the following year.

Sheep’s clothing?

Beset as she is by a selfish and ambitious daughter, dubious relatives (Suzy Suffern, who dresses in dead people’s clothes) and a society which shows no sympathy to her plight, Mrs Lidcote has yet one supporter who offers loyalty and understanding. Franklin Ide has been a friend and admirer for many years, and he reassures her that times and attitudes have changed – “It’s all right”, he repeats, and seems to be correct. He goes out of his way to renew the appeal he wishes to make to her (which is not made explicit).

But when examined more closely, he turns out to be a empty shell. All his appeals to Mrs Lidcote are made in private, outside the society to which they both belong – on holiday in Switzerland and in the New York hotel room where she stays on arrival and departure. And of course when she finally accepts the idea of socialising with some of her contemporaries, he is exposed as a conventionalist, because he is embarrassed and does not want to be seen with her. So at best he is fraud, but at worst he is a snake in the grass who all the time has been proposing an illicit relationship.

So Mrs Lidcote triumphs morally over those who are trying to decieve her – her daughter Leila and her ‘admirer’ Franklin Ide. She reduces them both to a state of acute confusion (they both blush) by forcing them to confront the truth of their hypocrisy and double standards. But she has spent the entire story cooped up in rooms – at the hotel, and in her daughter’s house – and it has to be said that in the end she is going back to a state of confinement in her Florentine apartment. She is ‘in the right’, but there is still a price to pay.


Autre Temps – study resources

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

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

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

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

Autres Temps - eBook edition Autres Temps – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Autres Temps


Autres Temps – story synopsis

Part I.   Mrs Lidcote is returning to America from Florence, where she has been living for eighteen years. She has received the news that her daughter Leila has divorced her husband Horace Pursh and married Wilbour Barkley. She fears that Leila will be ostracised by New York society as she was herself in the past for a similar social indiscretion. On board the Utopia she is snubbed by ambassador’s wife Mrs Lorrin Boulger, but is reassured by an old friend Franklin Ide, who tells her that everything will be all right.

Part II.   She is met in New York by her cousin Suzy Suffern who reveals that the old social conventions of upper-class society have been replaced by more liberal attitudes. There is no longer any need for her to fear social censure. Mrs Lidcote has some years before received hints of a romantic kind from Franklin Ide, but she has not taken them up because she thought her negative reputation would damage his happiness (as it had done in her previous history). Now that times have changed and Leila doesn’t need her mother’s protection any more, Franklin Ide renews his expressions of interest.

Part III.   Leila has house guests when Mrs Lidcote arrives there, and she keeps her mother at a distance emotionally whilst expressing a exaggerated concern for her welfare. Mrs Lidcote reflects on the sacrifices she had to make for her chance of love and happiness, compared with the ease with which Leila takes everything for granted.

Part IV.   Mrs Lidcote is urged to stay in her guest room and rest – because it becomes apparent that Leila has invited older guests to dinner. They include Mrs Lorrin Boulger, because Leila wants to secure a diplomatic appointment for her new husband in Italy. Mrs Lidcote is offended by this treatment, sees a challenge, at first refuses to stay in her room.

Part V.   Leila arrives in haste, trying to prevent her mother appearing at dinner. Once again she pretends an overwhelming concern for her mother’s comfort – but Mrs Lidcote exposes her deviance and hypocrisy, causing her deep embarrassment. Having triumphed in this way, Mrs Lidcote then declares that she will stay in her room until all the guests have departed after the weekend.

Part VI.   The following Monday she announces that she is returning immediately to Florence. Franklin Ide intercepts her in her New York hotel. She explains to him how shabbily she was treated. He tries to persuade her she is wrong and offers himself to her again, but when she puts him to the concrete test of meeting some mutual friends together, he is deeply embarrassed and unable to face the social challenge.


Principal characters
Mrs Lidcote a middle-aged American divorcee and expatriate
Leila her recently divorced and re-married daughter
Suzy Suffern her cousin, who dresses in mourning
Mrs Lorrin Boulger the wife of an American ambassador
Franklin Ide old friend and suitor to Mrs Lidcote

Video documentary


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

Edith Wharton’s writing


Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth 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 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.

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


Filed Under: Wharton - Stories Tagged With: Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story

Bunner Sisters

February 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Bunner Sisters was written in 1891, but wasn’t published until 1916 in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction Xingu and Other Stories. Technically, it has very strong claims to be classified as a novella, rather than a short story, but it is usually listed with her shorter works to keep it separate from the novels.

Bunner Sisters

Old New York


Bunner Sisters – critical commentary

Literary naturalism

There was a literary vogue towards the end of the nineteenth century for naturalism – which is characterised by a concentration on everyday, unheroic subjects, often seeking to expose the poverty and misery of existence in contrast to the romantic and heroic treatment of life in traditional fiction. Naturalism as a literary mode was underpinned by a belief in determinism – that social conditions and heredity were the primary forces shaping human character. It was also strongly influenced by two other important philosophic features of late nineteenth century society – the decline of religious belief and the powerful influence of Darwinism and its popular manifestation in the idea of ‘the survival of the fittest’.

Both of these ideas led the adherents of naturalism to emphasise a pessimistic view of life, and they also took the opportunity to expose the harsher and degenerate sides of society, including poverty, crime, prostitution, and corruption in general. There was also a marked tendency amongst naturalistic works to focus on the life of big cities. Writers who epitomised this literary trend included Emile Zola (France), Theodore Dreiser (USA), Stephen Crane (USA) and George Gissing (UK) – all of whom were at the height of their fame when Edith Wharton started writing.

Bunner Sisters certainly includes many of these ideas. Although it seems to begin in a mildly satirical manner, its trajectory is grimly pessimistic as things go from bad to worse in the two sisters’ lives. Their business slowly dries up; they are preyed upon by a man who turns out to be an opium addict; and he eventually ruins Evelina’s life, which in turn leaves Ann Eliza destitute.

These naturalistic tendencies are worth noting, because they were still present in Edith Wharton’s work when she came to write her first major novel, The House of Mirth in 1905. Lily Bart falls from a much greater social height than Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner, but she ends in a similar fashion – destitute, ill, and exhausted with self-sacrifice.


Bunner Sisters – study resources

Bunner Sisters Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Bunner Sisters Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Bunner Sisters - eBook edition Bunner Sisters – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Bunner Sisters - eBook edition Bunner Sisters – AudioBook format at librivox

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Bunner Sisters


Bunner Sisters – plot summary

Part I.   Ageing sisters Ann Eliza and Evelina Bunner maintain a millinery shop in a seedy and run down area of New York. They live in straightened circumstances, and on the occasion of Evelina’s birthday, her sister buys her a cheap clock.

Part II.   She has bought the clock from an equally run down shop in the neighbourhood run by bachelor Herman Ramay, who she decides to pursue when the clock stops working. She goes to the local market, hoping to meet him there, but doesn’t. A lifetime of co-operative self-sacrifice and renunciation begins to crumble as the two women secretly become competetive regarding Mr Ramay.

Part III.   Mr Ramay calls to check the clock they have bought, but nothing transpires from the visit.

Part IV.   They then entertain Miss Mellins, a dressmaker from upstairs, whereupon Mr Ramay visits again. Ann Eliza is jealously concerned that he is visiting to see her younger sister.

Part V.   Mr Ramay visits more frequently, but divides his time there between long silences and lengthy autobiographical anecdotes. He takes Evelina to a stereopticon; spring arrives; and he invites them both to Central Park, along with Miss Mellins. Ann Eliza is forbearing on her sister’s behalf.

Part VI.   The sisters wish to transfer their meagre earnings into another bank. Ann Eliza calls for advice on Mr Ramay, who seems to have been ill.

Part VII.   Mr Ramay takes them on an excursion to his friend Mrs Hochmuller in Hoboken. Over dinner they discuss Mr Ramay’s illness – which he denies. Then Evelina and Mr Ramay go for a walk in the countryside. Shortly afterwards Mr Ramay calls to the shop and proposes marriage to Ann Eliza, but she tells him she cannot think of marrying. She is secretly ecstatic at this major event in her life, and disappointed that she cannot reveal it to her sister.

Part VIII.   Mr Ramay then goes on an excursion with Evelina, who returns to announce that she is engaged to Mr Ramay. Ann Eliza prepares herself for being left alone when her sister moves to live at Mr Ramay’s shop. However, Mr Ramay gets the offer of a job in St Louis, though he does not have enough money to risk transferring there. Ann Eliza gives her sister her half of their joint savings.

Part IX.   Left on her own, Ann Eliza feels very lonely, and Evelina writes from St Louis to say that she is lonely because Mr Ramay is out at work all day. Then the letters cease, and Ann Eliza learns that Mr Ramay has been dismissed by his employers. She cannot afford to visit St Louis and look for her sister, and meanwhile the business goes downhill.

Part X.   Anna goes to seek help from Mrs Hochmuller in Hoboken, but when she gets there she discovers that Mrs Hochmuller left some time before. She contracts fever as a result of the journey and is in bed for over a week. When she recovers she visits Mr Ramay’s old employers, only to be told that he was dismissed for taking drugs.

Part XI.   Months pass by, then one day Evelina suddenly appear at the shop. She is in a very bad way, and recounts her tale of Mr Ramay’s opium addiction, the birth and death of her child, and Ramay’s running away with young Linda Hochmuller. Evelina was reduced to begging in the streets.

Part XII.   Evelina continues to be very ill, and Anna has to borrow money from Miss Mellins to pay the doctor’s bill. Anna loses her faith in Providence and feels that self-sacrifice does not automatically transfer good or benefit to its intended recipient. The doctor recommends hospital for Evelina, but Anna prefers to keep her at home. Evelina reveals that during her troubles she has converted to Catholicism.

Part XIII.   Evelina gets steadily worse (with consumption) and believes her Catholic faith will permit her to be reunited with her baby in heaven. When Evelina dies, Anna gives up the shop, sells the last of her effects, and faces a bleak and unknown future.


Bunner Sisters – principal characters
Ann Eliza Bunner elder sister in a millinery shop
Evelina Bunner her younger sister
Miss Mellins their upstairs neighbour, a dressmaker
Herman Ramay a German immigrant clock-maker
Mrs Hochmuller washerwoman friend of Ramay
Linda Hochmuller her young daughter

Video documentary


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

Edith Wharton’s writing


Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth 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.

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


Filed Under: Wharton - Stories Tagged With: Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story

Confession

August 19, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Confession first appeared in Edith Wharton’s collection of stories The World Over, which was published in 1936. It is based upon a famous (and scandalous) incident from 1892 which Edith Wharton had used for the basis of a stage play which she never completed.

Confession

Edith Wharton


Confession – critical comments

Murder mystery

The puzzle to this story is explained by the fact that nowhere is the truth of the situation made explicit. Everything is revealed via inference and small details which add up to the fact that Kate has killed her father. The trial jury concluded that Ezra Spain was killed by ‘a passing tramp’ and his daughter Kate has been acquitted of any involvement in the crime on the strength of the evidence of the household servant Cassie Donovan who testified that they were both elsewhere at the time of the murder. As Jimmy Shreve points out to Severance in his exposition of the facts:

Cassie was the servant girl’s name, sure enough … It was her evidence that got Kate Spain off. But at the trial she was a thin haggard Irish girl in dirty calico

But she has become larger and coarsened through over-indulgence, and like Kate she has changed her name – from Donovan to Willpert. Cassie has complete control over Kate, who does whatever her socially subservient travelling companion decides.

Kate also provides Cassie with an allowance, and in earlier attempts to free herself from the dominance of her companion she has offered to give her a house and double her allowance – offers which were refused.

Because Miss Willpert is such an unappetizing figure (especially in the eyes of the first person narrator Severance) superficial suspicion is cast over her as the villain whom Kate Ingram has agreed to protect.

But in fact the truth is the other way round. Cassie Donovan has provided an alibi for Kate Spain, who is guilty of the murder. In return for this favour Kate is forever beholden to her former domestic servant. This explains her inability to act in her own interest. Kate is not free to do anything – because Cassie has the evidence which could reveal her guilt.

That evidence is information she carries within herself, and it is encapsulated in the written document Cassie is about to produce from her handbag when she has her stroke. Following her death, that evidence is rescued from the police by Severance’s vigilance and is passed over to Kate.

Severance guesses that the envelope contains information about the trial, but he assumes that Kate has concealed evidence to shield someone else (that person most likely being Cassie Willpert). He does not suspect Kate herself, and thus he remains ‘innocent and slightly naive’ until the end..

Lizze Borden

This story has strong echoes of the Lizze Borden trial – a case which shocked America (and the world) in 1892. Lizzie was tried for killing her wealthy but tyrannical and tight-fisted father and her stepmother with an axe, but acquitted because of conflicts and lacunae in the evidence.

The trial caused a sensation which was intensified by extensive coverage in newspapers. And even though she was acquitted, Lizzie was ostracised by the public ever afterwards. Edith Wharton not only knew about the famous Lizzie Borden case, she started writing a play about it, called Kate Price but never finished it.

The case is remembered in American folk memory by the anonymous rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

Setting
The story begins in a hotel situated in Mont Soleil in the Engadine, southwest Switzerland. When the two women leave for Italy, Severance follows them to Orta in the Italian lakes.


Confession – study resources

Confession - paperback edition Confession – Capuchin Classics – Amazon UK

Confession - paperback edition Confession – Capuchin Classics – Amazon US

Confession - NYRB edition The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

Confession - NYRB edition The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Confession - Norton edition Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Confession - Norton edition Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Confession - eBook edition Confession – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Confession


Confession – plot summary

Severance, a somewhat naive and imperceptive New York banker is convalescing in a Swiss hotel when he encounters a mysterious woman with whom he very rapidly falls in love. She is Mrs Kate Ingram, and is closely protected by a brusque and masculine travelling companion Cassie Willpert, who takes a dislike to Severance. Jimmy Shreve, a journalist friend of Severance arrives at the hotel and claims that Mrs Ingram is in fact Kate Spain, a woman who has been acquitted in a trial for the murder of her rich and tyrannical father. Severance does not believe this story.

He tries hard to express his interest in Mrs Ingram and to learn more about her, but is repeatedly thwarted by Miss Willpert. Mrs Ingram finally hints that she will reveal more about herself the next day. But when Severance presents himself he learns that the two women have left the hotel for Italy.

He follows Mrs Ingram to a shabby pension on Lake Orta in Italy where she confesses to him that she is Kate Spain, and has travelled to escape the opprobrium attached to her name. Severance makes an offer of marriage, but she says that Cassie Willpert will never agree to it. They agree to meet her the next day to seek a resolution.

But next morning Cassie Willpert confronts Severance in his room. She tells him that Kate Spain cannot marry him or anyone else. She then tries to bribe him to leave, and when he refuses she threatens to reveal something that will shock him into submission. She is about to produce the evidence when she has a stroke.

In fact she dies shortly afterwards without revealing anything. Severance presses his offer of marriage again, whereupon Mrs Ingram produces an envelope belonging to Miss Willpert and insists that Severance read it. He accepts the envelope, insists he will not read it, but promises not to destroy it.

Severance assumes that the contents of the envelope have some bearing on the death of Kate’s father, and he assumes that she is protecting someone – the overt implication being that this person is Miss Willpert. But since she is now dead, all objections to the marriage are removed. They do finally marry, but Mrs Ingram dies five years later, whereupon Severance burns the envelope.


Principal characters
Severance the first person narrator, a New York banker
Mrs Kate Ingram the dark mysterious lady
Miss Crissie Willpert her travelling companion
Antoine the head waiter
Mr Jimmy Shreve journalist on the New York Evening Star

Confession

Edith Wharton’s publications


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

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

The ReefThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book from Amazon US


Edith Wharton – web links

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

Edith WhartonThe 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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2012


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


Filed Under: Wharton - Stories Tagged With: Confession, Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story

Diagnosis

November 16, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Diagnosis first appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1930. It was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Human Nature published in 1936.

Diagnosis

Old New York – Union Square


Diagnosis – critical comments

It’s unfortunate the so many of Edith Wharton’s stories rely upon the rather tired convention of the surprise ending or the ‘twist in the tale’ – but fortunately her shorter fictions usually operate at more than the surface level of story alone. Diagnosis is primarily a study in egoism. Paul Dorrance is an example of terminal self-regard combined with bad faith He is a bachelor of fifty who has lived with his mother and has relied on Eleanor Welwood as a friend and mistress.

Now that his mother has died and Eleanor is divorced, there is nothing to stop him marrying her. But in fact he is tired of her, yet when he thinks he has been diagnosed with cancer he proposes so that he will have someone to comfort him in his dying days. How he views his wife (and other people) is entirely instrumental, conditioned by his own needs. Occasionally, he thinks to do something for Eleanor’s own good, but in the end he fails to follow up on these impulses and does nothing about them.

Wharton rather cleverly narrates the story entirely from Dorrance’s point of view – so we have no insight into his wife’s state of mind except for a few scraps of conversation that pass between them. Thus we only learn after Eleanor’s death that she knew Dorrance had not been diagnosed with cancer before she married him. She is a woman who has turned forty and has never been attractive, and her previous husband divorced her because of her relationship with Dorrance. The clear implication is that whilst Dorrance has been manipulating Eleanor for his own ends, she has in fact indulged in a form of subterfuge in order to snare him.


Diagnosis – study resources

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

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

Diagnosis Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Diagnosis Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Diagnosis - eBook edition Tales of Men and Ghosts – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK


Diagnosis – story synopsis

Part I.   Paul Dorrance, a New York businessman, has been living with his aged mother and in a relationship with Eleanor Welwood, a married woman, for the last fifteen years. When his mother dies and Eleanor is divorced, he continues to be supported by her friendship, but does not want to commit himself to her in any way.He visits his specialist doctors, who give him a clean bill of health, but he later finds their written diagnosis of terminal cancer. Realising that he has not got long to live, he asks Eleanor to marry him, because he is frightened of facing the prospect. She thinks it’s because the doctors’ diagnosis is good.

Part II.   He later reveals the truth of the diagnosis to her, they marry, and travel to tour Europe. In Vienna he consults another specialist who says he does not have cancer and should simply treat himself to a restful holiday. Eleanor reveals that she did not really believe in the original diagnosis.

Part III.   Since all is well, Eleanor proposes returning to New York, but Paul feels as if his old self has died, and he wants to explore the possibilities of the new self he perceives as lying ahead of him.

Part IV.   However, two further years of foreign travel reveal nothing new to him, so they return to New York. On return he feels cheated, and that he has somehow been tricked into a marriage he did not really want. There is a hint of a potential connection with a young woman he met whilst in Cairo. He settles back into his old work routine.

Part V.   Two years later it is Eleanor who is suffering with pneumonia. Paul thinks he ought to help her to recover, but she is cut off from him in her illness. She recovers briefly and wishes to tell him something important, but he dissuades her – and she dies without telling him.

Part VI.   One of Eleanor’s doctors is also one of Paul’s own former specialists. He reveals that the written cancer diagnosis was made for somebody else – and Eleanor returned it on the day it was found. She had known the truth of Paul’s condition all along.


Video documentary


Principal characters
Paul Dorrance a New York businessman (50)
Mrs Eleanor Welwood his married mistress, then wife (40+)

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount


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

Edith Wharton’s writing


Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

The ReefThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Reef 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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Edith Wharton biography

July 8, 2011 by Roy Johnson

Edith Wharton biography

writer, traveller, socialite, gardener, interior designer

1862. Edith Newbold Jones born into wealthy ‘old money’ family in New York. Her childhood nickname was ‘Pussy Jones’.

1866. Following depreciation on the US Dollar after the Civil war, family move to tour and live in Europe for economic reasons. They live in Paris, Rome, Germany, and Spain. Edith learns French, Italian and German. She inherits a strong sense of place and visual memory from her father.

1872. Family returns to live in New York city, spending the summers in Newport. Edith has a difficult, estranged, and rivalrous relationship with her mother, who has no sympathy with Edith’s artistic and imaginative interests. Edith relieves her solitude by reading in her father’s library, where she becomes acquainted with classics of modern French, Italian, English literature.

1877. First poems published in Atlantic Monthly.

1879. Successful debut into New York society at 17 years old.

1880. The family returns to live in Europe – London, Paris, and Venice. Edith strongly influenced by Ruskin and his concepts of art and architecture.

1882. Death of her father in Cannes. Edith and her mother return to New York.

1885. Edith marries Edward (Teddy) Wharton who does not share her intellectual tastes. It is a marriage for which she is singularly unprepared. They set up home at ‘Penridge Cottage’ (a lavish house) in Newport, and socialize amongst rich New Yorkers (Van Allens, Astors, Vanderbildts) giving parties, boating, and engaging in fashionable archery contests.

1888. Whartons go on lavish Mediterranean cruise paid for with a legacy.

1889. Edith’s stories and poems began to appear in Scribner’s Magazine. She begins to suffer from attacks of asthma, nausea, and fatigue

1892. The Whartons acquire their own first home at Land’s End in Newport – another large-scale house with views on the Atlantic.

1893. French poet and writer Paul Bourget arrives in Newport with a letter of introduction and becomes lifelong friend. He introduces her to his intellectual friends in Paris. She makes intellectual friendship with Edgerton Wynthrop, who becomes her mentor. Meets architect Ogden Codman and commissions him to re-furbish her house at Land’s end.

1897. She co-writes and publishes with Ogden Codman The Decoration of Houses, which is immediately successful and establishes her reputation as an interior designer with a taste for modern style, removing the clutter of the Victorian period from homes. She promotes Codman’s reputation and becomes virtually the project manager of his commissions.

1898. Suffers a nervous collapse and is advised to take a rest-cure by the same doctor who treated Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

1899. Publishes The Greater Inclination, a collection of short stories.

1901. Publishes Crucial Instances a second collection of short stories. Death of her mother in Paris. Edith inherits $90,000 and immediately begins building a huge house (forty-two rooms) in Lenox, Massachusetts.

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s house – The Mount

1902. Scribners publish The Valley of Indecision, her first novel, which re-creates eighteenth century Italy.

1903. Travels in Europe, and writes Italian Villas and their Gardens. Meets Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and painter John Singer Sargeant.

1904. Begins friendship with Henry James. She earns more from her writing than he does. They travel together in motor cars named after George Sand’s lovers. The Descent of Man and Other Stories.

1905. The House of Mirth her next novel dealing with modern New York, becomes a best-selling success, following serialization in Scribner’s Magazine.

1906. Edith and her husband spend time in England with Henry James.

1907. Whartons travel through France with Henry James, where Edith meets London Times correspondent W. Morton Fullerton. She starts writing her secret ‘love diary’.

James and Wharton go Motoring

Edith Wharton motoring with Henry James

1908. Edith begins an affair with Fullerton and is passionately moved for the first time in her life. She confides in Henry James, who advises her to ‘sit tight’.

1909. Meets art critic Bernard Berenson in Paris, and for first time does not return to spend the summer at her house, The Mount.

1911. The affair with Fullerton comes to an end, but they remain friends. She establishes an American expatriate salon in Paris and mixes with many cosmopolitan artists – Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide, Serge Diaghilev, and Walter Sickert. Close friendships with Comtesse Rosa de Fitz-James and Comtesse Anna de Noailles. Publishes her novella Ethan Frome which she says ends her period of apprenticeship as a writer.

1912. Edith sells her house The Mount and the same year is formally divorced from her husband Teddy. Publishes The Reef.

1913. Publishes The Custom of the Country.

1914. At the outbreak of the first world war, Edith sets up workshops for working-class women whose husbands have been conscripted. Travels around battlefront in her car with Walter Beery, and writes pro-French articles for the American press. Engages in fund-raising efforts amongst her friends

1916. Death of her friend Henry James. She is awarded the Legion of Honour.

1917. Publishes novella Summer.

1918. Purchases eighteenth-century house, Pavilion Colombie, outside Paris. Restores the house and develops its seven acres of formal gardens

1920. Buys and restores Chateau Sainte-Claire and its gardens in Hyeres, southern Provence. Publishes The Age of Innocence. Begins writing ‘Beatrice Palmato’ – a work about incest.

1921. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. A great deal of her time is spent developing the extensive gardens on her two estates in Paris and Hyeres.

1923. Makes her final visit to the USA where she is awarded honorary doctorate at Yale university – the first woman to be so honoured. Increasingly reliant on servants – at a time when in the post-war era when working ‘in-service’ was less popular.

1925. Publishes The Writing of Fiction.

1926. Charters yacht for Mediterranean cruise. Visits Bernard Berenson at I Tatti.

1929. Publishes Hudson River Bracketed.

1930. Collection of short stories, Certain People appears.

1933. Another collection of short fiction, Human Nature appears.

1934. Publishes her reminiscences, A Backward Glance. Begins work on a final novel, The Buccaneers, which is never published.

1937. Dies of heart failure and is buried at Versailles.

© Roy Johnson 2011


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Edith Wharton criticism

May 9, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Edith Wharton criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Wharton and her works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks and print-on-demand reissues. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings a hardback copy of Hermione Lee’s biography Edith Wharton was available at Amazon for one penny.

Edith Wharton criticism

Edith Wharton (Writers and their Work) – Janet Beer, Northcote House Publishers, 2001. An introduction to the whole range of Edith Wharton’s work in the novel, short story, novella, travel writing, criticism and autobiography. The major novels are discussed as are: contemporary reception of her work, American responses to her expatriation, her friendships with the leading artists of her day, and the influence of the First World War on her work.

Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman – Janet Beer and Avril Horner, London: Palgrave , 2011. Wharton’s late and critically-neglected novels are reclaimed as experimental in form and radical in content in this study, which also suggests that her portrayal of older female characters in her last six novels anticipates contemporary unease about the cultural nationalization of the older woman in Western society.

The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton – Millicent Bell, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Essays covering Wharton’s most important novels as well as some of her shorter fiction, and utilise both traditional and innovative critical techniques, applying the perspectives of literary history, feminist theory, psychology or biography, sociology or anthropology, or social history.

Edith Wharton and the French Riviera – Elizabeth Collas, Flammarion, 2002. This is a study of the area when Edith Wharton arrived, and how the region developed from then on. Richly illustrated with both contemporary and vintage photographs, and completed with an extensive bibliography, it is a hugely evocative portrait of the Golden Age of the Riviera.

Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life – Eleanor Dwight, Harry N. Abrams, 1994. This study portrays Wharton the writer, traveller, socialite, gardener, architect, interior designer, art scholar, expatriate, war worker and connoisseur of life. A wealth of photographs provide a visual survey of the life and times of this multifaceted woman.

The Gilded Age: Edith Wharton and Her Contemporaries – Eleanor Dwight, Universe Publishing, 1996. A portrait of the dynamic era in America, from the 1870s to the early twentieth century.

Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton – Kathy A. Fodorko, The University of Alabama Press, 1995. This study shows how Wharton, in sixteen short stories and six major novels, adopts and adapts Gothic elements as a way to explore the nature of feminine and masculine ways of knowing and being and to dramatize the tension between them.

Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle – Susan Goodman, University of Texas Press, 2011. Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, this study presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored.

Edith Warton’s Women: Friends and Rivals – Susan Goodman, University Press of New England, 1990.

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Pamela Knights (ed), Cambridge University Press, 2009. An accessible and stimulating introduction to Wharton’s life and writings, to help map her work for new readers, and to encourage more detailed exploration of her texts and contexts.

Edith Wharton – Hermione Lee, London: Chatto and Windus, 2007. This critical biography displays Wharton as a tough, erotically brave, and startlingly modern writer.

Edith Wharton: A Biography – R.W.B. Lewis, Vintage Editions, 1993. Pulitzer Prize-winning biography paints a vivid picture of Wharton’s rich and varied life: her writings and travelling, her friendships with luminaries of the period such as Henry James and Kenneth Clarke, and the great, all-consuming love affair of her middle age.

Student Companion to Edith Wharton – Melissa McFarland Pennell, Greenwood Press, 2003. Provides an introduction to Wharton’s fiction, beginning with her life and career, plus in-depth discussion of her writing, along with analyses of thematic concerns, character development, historical context, and plots.

Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York – Maureen E. Montgomery, London: Routledge, 1998. This study argues for a reconsideration of the role of women in the bourgeois elite in turn-of-the-century America. By contrasting multiple images of women drawn from newspapers, magazines, private correspondence, etiquette manuals and the New York fiction of Edith Wharton, it offers an antidote to the tendency in women’s history to overlook women whose class affiliations have put them in a position of power.

Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts – Emily J. Orlando, University of Alabama Press, 2009. Explores Edith Wharton’s career-long concern with a 19th-century visual culture that limited female artistic agency and expression.

The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War – A. Price, Robert Hale Ltd, 1996. The study draws on unpublished letters and archival materials in Europe and the US, to document Wharton’s activities as a fund-raiser, philanthropist, propagandist and political activist during this period.

Edith Wharton in Context – Laura Rattray, Cambridge University Press, 2012. This volume provides the first substantial text dedicated to the various contexts that frame Wharton’s remarkable career. Each essay offers a clearly argued and lucid assessment of Wharton’s work as it relates to seven key areas: life and works, critical receptions, book and publishing history, arts and aesthetics, social designs, time and place, and literary milieux.

Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit – Carol J. Singley, Cambridge University Press, 1998. This study analyzes the short stories and seven novels in the light of religious and philosophical developments in Wharton’s life and fiction. It situates Wharton in the context of turn-of-the-century science, historicism, and aestheticism, reading her religious and philosophical outlook as an evolving response to the cultural crisis of belief.

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Carol J. Singley, Oxford University Press, 2003. Provides scholarly and general readers with historical contexts that illuminate Wharton’s life and writing in new ways. Essays in the volume expand the sense of Wharton as a novelist of manners and demonstrate her engagement with issues of her day.

Edith Wharton in Context: Essays on Intertextuality – Adeline R. Tinter, University of Alabama Press, 2015. A detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and Henry James – how they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. Plus essays on Wharton’s response to Italian renaissance painters.

Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture – Gary Totten, University of Alabama Press, 2007. Essays in this collection address issues such as parallels between Wharton’s characters and the houses they occupy; dress as a metaphor for the flux of critical fashion; the marketing of Wharton’s work to a growing female readership; her relationship to mass culture industries such as advertising, theater, and cinema; the tableaux vivant both as set piece and as fictional strategy; the representation of female bodies as objets d’art; and her characters’ attempts at self-definition through the acquisition and consumption of material goods

Edith Wharton and the Art of Fiction – Penelope Vita-Finzi, Continuum International Publishing, 1994. Explores Edith Wharton’s concept of the artist and shows how her views about the education and environment necessary for the writer were rigid and consciously rooted in 19th century thought rather than being influenced by contemporary literary and intellectual debates.

Edith Wharton’s Letters From the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing – Candace Waid, University of North Carolina Press. Presents an innovative reading of the work of Edith Wharton. Waid examines Wharton’s lifelong preoccupation with the place of the American woman writer, which she locates in the context of Wharton’s ambivalent reaction to America.

Edith Wharton at Home: Life at the Mount – Richard Guy Wilson, Monacelli Press, 2012. Presents Wharton’s life at the house she designed and built in vivid detail, with authoritative text and archival images, as well as new colour photography of the restoration of The Mount and its spectacular gardens.

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Edith Wharton short stories

March 13, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, critical commentary, and study resources

Edith Wharton published more than eighty short stories during her writing career. The exact number is debatable, because some are so long (such as the early tale, The Touchstone) that they can be counted as novellas. She certainly produced stories regularly from 1900 until her last collection Ghosts in 1937. During that time she also wrote a number of full length novels, as well as works of non-fiction, such as her travel writing, her war memoirs, and books on the design of house interiors and gardens. The following are tutorials and study guides which offer plot summaries, characters, critical commentaries, and suggestions for further reading on each story. The list will be updated as new stories are added.

Edith Wharton stories   After Holbein
Edith Wharton stories   Afterward
Edith Wharton stories   Autres Temps
Edith Wharton stories   Bunner Sisters
Edith Wharton short stories   Confession
Edith Wharton short stories   Diagnosis
Edith Wharton short stories   His Father’s Son
Edith Wharton short stories   Kerfol
Edith Wharton short stories   Pomegranate Seed
Edith Wharton short stories   Roman Fever
Edith Wharton short stories   Sanctuary
Edith Wharton short stories   Souls Belated
Edith Wharton short stories   The Angel at the Grave
Edith Wharton short stories   The Last Asset
Edith Wharton short stories   The Long Run
Edith Wharton short stories   The Muse’s Tragedy
Edith Wharton short stories   The Other Two
Edith Wharton short stories   The Portrait
Edith Wharton short stories   The Pretext
Edith Wharton short stories   The Reckoning
Edith Wharton short stories   The Touchstone
Edith Wharton short stories   The Triumph of Night
Edith Wharton short stories   The Verdict
Edith Wharton short stories   Xingu


Video documentary


Study resources

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Triumph of Night Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Edith Wharton - biography Edith Wharton – biography

Edith Wharton - Wikipedia Edith Wharton at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

Edith Wharton - tutorials Edith Wharton’s Short Stories – publication details


Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing


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

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe 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.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe 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.

Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life

July 6, 2011 by Roy Johnson

writer, traveller, socialite, gardener, interior designer

Edith Wharton is a writer whose life and work spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – rather like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and even Thomas Hardy. Most of her published output was produced after 1900, yet she represents the mores and values of ‘old money’ upper class America confronted by the economic and social challenges of the New Century. Not that she had to endure any of its hardships and uncertainties. She was born into a very rich family and when the dollar lost value after the end of the Civil War she spent much of her childhood living in France and Italy .She learned foreign languages, inherited a keen visual memory and an appreciation of sense of place from her father, whose private library of classics provided the materials of her education.

Edith Wharton Most of her younger life was spent oscillating between lavish homes in New York and fashionable retreats on the Eastern seaboard in summer months. She was a precocious youngster, and had poetry and stories published whilst still in her teens. As a popular Young Thing of her very privileged set, she was quickly successful in acquiring a rich and handsome husband. However, Teddy Wharton was an outdoor pursuits type who did not share her intellectual aspirations. They set up home in New York, but when she came into a very generous inheritance she immediately bought a huge ‘summer house’ at Land’s End, Newport. She commissioned architect Ogden Codman to refurbish the house, then co-wrote with him what became the first of her many best-sellers – The Decoration of Houses.

She lived a rather independent life and had friendships with a number of men and women. However, when she met the London Times journalist W. Morton Fullerton in Paris, she felt for the first time in her life she had located a soul mate. They became lovers, even though he was bisexual and had a rather disreputable past. The affair lasted three years, after which she divorced her husband and began to travel regularly in Europe with her friend Henry James, who was an admirer of her writing. She published her first major novel The House of Mirth in 1905, and thereafter produced a healthy output of travel writing, novels, and short stories.

Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s house – The Mount

She established an American expatriate salon in Paris and mixed with a cosmopolitan selection of artists and intellectuals, including Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, Andre Gide, and Walter Sickert. When the first world War broke out she quickly threw herself into providing employment for working-class French women whose husbands had been conscripted. She toured the front lines of battle in her chauffeur driven limousine and wrote accounts supporting the French war effort – for which she was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1916.

After the war she established two houses and their gardens – one on the outskirts of Paris, and the other at Hyéres, in southern Provence. These properties were used as bases from which she continued to tour Europe and the Mediterranean. She became an expert on garden design (rather like Vita Sackville-West) although she never did any of the actual gardening herself. She continued to publish novels, novellas, and her memoirs right up to her death in 1937.

Eleanor Dwight’s account of Wharton’s life isn’t a biography in the conventional sense of tracing her movements in chronological order. Instead, it takes main issues and places – New York, Italy, the motor car, and the war – as a framework on which to build the larger picture. Indeed, Wharton’s affair with Fullerton is mentioned in three brief lines between several pages of rapture about her garden designs.

Dwight also takes the common liberty of paraphrasing and interpreting Wharton’s fiction as a guide to understanding the conflicts in her life – a very dubious practice which also omits to point out how funny her writing can be. But on balance it makes for a very readable narrative, and as a lavishly illustrated study, the period photographs add both charm and depth to her study.

Edith Wharton Buy the book at Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N Abrams, new edition, 1999, pp.296, ISBN: 0810927950


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Filed Under: Biography, Edith Wharton Tagged With: 20C Literature, American literature, Biography, Edith Wharton, Literary studies, The novel

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