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Ethan Frome

July 12, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Edidth Wharton wrote the first version of Ethan Frome in French, as an exercise for her tutor and gave it the title Hiver (1907). It consisted of only a few pages, and was abandoned unfinished. But she returned to the story in 1911 and added the structural device of the outer narrator. Some people see the story as a reflection of Wharton’s own life, since it was around this time that she brought to an end both her own unhappy marriage and her love affair with W. Morton Fullerton. However, it is also possible to see in the story elements of her much earlier novel The House of Mirth (1905).

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

She regarded the novella as a significant turning point in her career as a writer – the end of her ‘apprenticeship’ as she called it. And for both its form and its brevity it has become a classic in the teaching of American literature, though it’s not so well known in Britain and the rest of Europe. However, it is an amazingly powerful story, and is told in a stark stripped-down style which suits both its subject and its setting of poor New England farming country.


Ethan Frome – critical commentary

Structure

The bulk of the narrative concerns events which take place within the space of only two or three days. But the story is ‘framed by a brief introduction and afterward which reveal the state of affairs twenty years later. The dramatic effect of this framing device is to both create narrative tension and to emphasise the fact that the events of these few days have an effect which lasts for the remainder of the characters’ lives.

  1. In the introduction an unnamed narrator (an engineer or project manager) stays in the local town whilst he is working nearby. He learns something of Ethan’s background from the locals, and hires him as a driver. One night they are cut off by a snow storm, and Ethan offers him accommodation for the night. This is related in first person narrative mode.
  2. Part two is a flashback in third person omniscient narrative mode recounting events that took place twenty years earlier. This includes Ethan’s unhappy marriage to Zeena, his passion for Mattie, and the events leading up to their fateful sledge ride.
  3. The afterward returns in first person mode to the morning after the introduction, in which the tragic consequences of the sledge ride are revealed to the narrator.

Narrative

The narrator claims that he has pieced together the story from scraps of information related to him by the local inhabitants. However, much of the story’s substance consists of the thoughts and feelings of Ethan and Mattie which only they could have known. Ethan is characterised as a taciturn and remote person who has been damaged by his life experiences, and the implication of the tale is that Mattie has been reduced to an almost vegetative state: so it is very unlikely that they would have given the narrator an account of their personal lives.

This is a weakness of narrative logic, but it is amply compensated by the concentrated drama of the main story itself.

The novella

You might wonder why Ethan Frome is generally regarded as a novella rather than a long short story. It’s because it possesses all the classic features of a novella.

Unity of place
Everything in the story takes place in Starkfield. The narrator arrives there; the events of twenty years earlier all took place there; and all the characters concerned are still there when the story ends.

Unity of action
The essential drama of the story unfolds in more or less one continuous action. Ethan realises he is attracted to Mattie – and so does Zeena. He enjoys his chaste dinner with her. And Zeena returns the following day with her plan to break up the relationship – at which Ethan rebels and takes Mattie on the fateful sledge ride.

These events are compressed into the shortest possible chronological sequence – which is framed by the narrator’s introduction and conclusion.

Unity of atmosphere
The events take place in winter, and the grim cold blanketting of snow remains present throughout as a unifying feature and a reminder of the emotionally life-supressing forces at work in the story.

Unity of character
There are a number of named characters in the story, but all of the drama is focussed on the three principals – Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie – who are locked together in a desperate power struggle.

They are locked into a triangle of rivalry at the start of events. Both Ethan and Mattie wish to escape from the bitter dominance of Zeena. But the power nexus is given an ironic twist be the events of the denouement: both Ethan and Mattie become entirely dependent on Zeena, who is forced to look after them.

Use of symbols
The persistent presence of cold and snow reflects the sexual repression which pervades the entire story.

Ethan’s house has lost part of its previous shape, just as he has become permanently injured as a result of the big ‘smash-up’ in the sledge ride.

Zeena has a glass bowl (a wedding present) which she never uses – but it is broken during the meagre supper that Ethan and Mattie share on their evening together.

The main issue
A short story is often a small incident from life which illuminates a character, or presents a moment of revelation. But a novella deals with a subject which stands for a much larger and all-important statement about the larger issues of life. It might contain a similar number of characters, but they represent more universal forces at work.

Ethan Frome deals with the entire adult lives of its three principal characters. The actions they take in the few crucial days which form the crux of the story turn out to determine the rest of their lives.


Ethan Frome – study resources

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Cliffs Notes – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Spark Notes – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – York Notes – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – free eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – free audioBook version at Project Gutenberg

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – DVD of 1993 movie adaptation – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – DVD of 1993 movie adaptation – Amazon US

Ethan Frome Ethan Frome – Kindle eBook edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Ethan Frome


Ethan Frome – plot summary

Edith Wharton - Ethan FromeEthan Frome is a poor working farmer who lives in a small remote town in Massachusetts. He exists in a state of near poverty with his wife Zeena (Zenobia), a grim, prematurely aged woman who makes hypochondria her hobby and his life a misery. Ethan has travelled as far as Florida and has intellectual aspirations, but he has never been able to develop or fulfil them. Living with them as an unpaid household help is Zeena’s cousin, Mattie Silver, a young woman who has lost her parents.

When Ethan escorts Mattie home from the local dance, he realises that he is deeply moved by her presence. This is something his wife is aware of, and she plans to be rid of the girl. When Zeena goes away overnight to consult a doctor, Ethan plans to enjoy a rare evening together with Mattie. They eat a humble supper together, and nothing except good feelings pass between them.

Next day Zeena returns to announce that she has ‘complications’ that will require a full time servant who she has already hired, and that Mattie must leave. Ethan is horrified by the prospect and makes plans to leave Zeena, but realises that he hasn’t the money or the prospects to support Mattie.

Nevertheless, he defies his wife and insists on driving Mattie to the station. On the way there he and Mattie declare their love for each other. Before the train arrives he fulfils a promise to take her sledging. After one very exhilarating run down a dangerous slope, Mattie proposes a suicide pact so that they will spend their last moments together. Ethan agrees, but instead of being united in death, they are both horribly injured.

Ethan and Mattie spend the rest of their lives in the care of Zeena.


Ethan Frome

first edition 1911


Principal characters
I an unnamed outer narrator who works in engineering
Ethan Frome a poor farmer with aspirations for a better life
Zeena (Zenobia) his grim, prematurely aged wife, who makes a career of hypochondria
Harmon Gow a Starkfield resident
Mrs Ned Hale the narrator’s landlady
Michael Eady Irish store owner
Denis Eady his son, who dances with Mattie
Mattie Silver Zeena’s cousin
Andrew Hale a builder
Jotham Powell a hired hand who does work for Ethan

Film adaptation

1993 film adaptation starring Liam Neeson


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 Age of InnocenceThe Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s. Newland Archer is charming, tactful, and enlightened. He accepts society’s standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future – until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence Buy the book from Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence Buy the book from Amazon US

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 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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2011


More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Edith Wharton, The Novella Tagged With: American literature, Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, Literary studies, The Novella

His Father’s Son

July 2, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

His Father’s Son first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine issue number 45 for June 1909. The story was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, Of Men and Ghosts published in 1910.

His Father's Son

Old New Yotk


His Father’s Son – critical comments

From the late nineteenth century onwards there was a widely accepted convention that short (and even longer) stories ought to finish with something of a twist in the tale. In the most extreme cases, this became known as the ‘whiplash ending’. All the information provided by the story up to its conclusion was suddenly reversed or overturned – either by a sudden twist of fate, or by new information which had hitherto been concealed from the reader.

Modernist writers from Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce onwards felt that this was a cheap and unsatisfactory literary device. They created narratives that would stand alone as satisfactory constructs without any element of surprise or dramatic revelation. But the device continued to be popular, particularly amongst writers of second rank or lower. Edith Wharton certainly resorts to this plot strategy from time to time in her stories, but in His Fathers Son she gives the surprise ending a double twist which goes some way to justifying its deployment.

Mason Grew is set up as a figure of mild pathos – the unfulfilled widower and man of commerce who is living out his youthful romantic aspirations via a son who appears to show no filial gratitude or appreciation. The doting patent is a common enough figure, both in life and in literature. And to the sad differences between them there is added the son’s higher social status, acquired at his father’s expense. The father is a manufacturer, and the son is a lawyer who mixes with wealthy New York socialites. How therefore to account for Ronald’s sensitive and artistic nature? The answer is – as Ronald himself thinks – in the long-hidden secret of his parentage. He is the love child of Fortuné Dolbrowski, whose letters to his mother Addie give proof of this idea.

That is twist number one – and there are hints enough in the story to encourage its credibility. But Wharton caps this revelation with a second more interesting twist. The correspondence with the great pianist was entirely the creation of Ronald’s father, Mason Grew, who seized a rare opportunity to exercise his own romanticism. Thus Ronald has inherited his romantic enthusiasms and disposition not from the pianist, but from his father, whose sensibility has been concealed beneath the trappings of manufacture and commerce.


His Father’s Son – study resources

His Father's Son The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

His Father's Son The New York Stories – New York Review Books – Amazon US

His Father's Son Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

His Father's Son Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

His Father's Son Tales of Men and Ghosts – Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

His Father's Son


His Father’s Son – story synopsis

Part I.   Following his wife’s death, Mason Grew moves from Connecticut to Brooklyn, so as to be near his son who is a New York lawyer. He tolerates Ronald’s lack of filial love by hiding behind a brash and over-confident exterior. As a practical businessman he nevertheless has romantic social ambitions which he lives out via Ronald, who is ashamed of his father’s lowly origins and success as a manufacturer of suspender buckles.

Part II.   As Ronald has risen in society he has fulfilled his father’s own dreams of what might have been. Drew even secretly visits the theatre where he can observe his son mixing with wealthy socialites. When he receives a telegram from Ronald, his father thinks back over his humdrum past with his unexceptional wife Addie, and how they once went to a concert given by a famous pianist Dolbrowski.

Part III.   Ronald is engaged to a rich girl Daisy and has come to tell his father that he can no longer accept his money because a cache of love letters from Dolbrowski to his mother have made him realise that he is the pianist’s natural son. Grew then puts Ronald straight by revealing that he wrote Addie’s letters to the pianist. He did it so that he could ‘breathe the same air’ as the great romantic, and this slender pleasure gave him the strength to continue in business for the sake of his son.


Principal characters
Mason Grew a practical businessman with romantic feelings
Ronald Grew his son, a New York lawyer
Addie Grew his dead wife
Fortuné Dolbrowski a concert pianist

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


His Father's Son

Edith Wharton’s publications


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 2013


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

Kerfol

June 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Kerfol first appeared in the Scribner’s Magazine number 59 for March 1916. The story was included in the collection Xingu and Other Stories published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1916. It is one of the many ghost stories Edith Wharton wrote and was also included in the collection Ghosts published in 1937.

Kerfol

cover design by Parish Maxfield


Kerfol – critical commentary

The principal feature of interest in this story is the manner in which the narrative is unfolded. The un-named narrator is encouraged to buy the old Brittany chateau, and visits a perfectly credible if slightly romantic old building with a moat, high walls, a garden and a tower. The only strange element is the absence of human habitation and the presence of so many unusually quiet dogs.

This introductory episode is then contrasted with and expanded upon in the reconstruction of the murder trial which the narrator makes from old court records. These events reveal the passionate drama of the imprisoned beauty (Anne) her cruel husband (Yves) and her would-be lover (Hervé). who is a relative and namesake of the friend of the narrator in the fictional ‘present’.

The ghosts of the story are not those of former human beings, but dogs seeking vengeance on the man who has strangled them to terrorise his wife. This is a reasonable variation on the Gothic horror story which has lingered from its heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to its fashionable revival at the begriming of the twentieth.

Edith Wharton wrote a number of ghost stories, and like her friend Henry James who did the same, she tried to create inventive variations on the plots and themes of this genre. Kerfol has a number of standard elements – the old deserted chateau, a wicked ‘King’, his beautiful young wife, and the would-be swain (all figures out of medieval romance) but to make the ghosts a pack of avenging dogs is something of a novelty, even if the outcome so far as Anne is concerned provides the tale with a conventionally grim ending and tragic victim.


Kerfol – study resources

Kerfol The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Kerfol The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon US

Kerfol The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Kerfol The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

Kerfol Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Kerfol Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Kerfol - eBook edition The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Kerfol


Kerfol – plot summary

Part I.   At the suggestion of his friend Lanvirain, an un-named narrator goes to visit an old semi-fortified mansion in Brittany. He is impressed by its age and the sense of history it exudes. No guardian or owners appear, but he is met by a pack of assorted dogs which are mysteriously quiet. When he returns to his friend’s house that night, Mrs Lanvirain tells him that the dogs are the ‘ghosts of Kerfol’.

Part II.   Next day Lanvirain lends him an old book containing the history of Kerfol, which the narrator then transcribes to reconstruct the historic events that constitute the remainder of the story.

Part III.   Some time during the seventeenth century, the lord of Kerfol, widower Yves de Cornault takes a new young wife Anne. The marriage is childless but successful. He is very strict with her, but showers her with valuables. After one trip away on business, he brings her a little brown dog.

When de Cornault is suddenly found mutilated and dead in the mansion, suspicion falls on his young wife, because she is discovered in the same place, covered in blood.

There is a trial, throughout which she maintains her innocence. But she is prepared to admit that on the night of the murder she had an assignation with Hervé de Lanvirain. She also claims that her husband had strangled her pet dog.

She met Lanrivain whilst on a religious visit, and he offered her his sympathy and support. When he leaves for a foreign journey, she gives him the dog’s collar as a memento. Her husband returns to the mansion and strangles the dog with the same collar. She obtains another dog, but he strangles that one too. The same thing happens to further dogs.

She then receives a secret message from Lanvirain and that night goes to meet him. When her husband suddenly appears at the top of the stairs, she claims he was attacked and mauled to death by a pack of dogs.

At the trial she is not convicted, but put in the care of her husband’s family. They shut her up in the dungeon at Kerfol where she dies many years later, having gone mad.


Kerfol – Principal characters
I an un-named narrator
Hervé de Lanvirain his friend
Yves de Cornault despotic lord of Kerfol
Anne de Cornault his pretty and much younger wife
Hervé de Lanvirain her would-be lover

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


Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014


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


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

Madame de Treymes

July 1, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

Madame de Treymes was published in 1907. It was Edith Wharton’s first major work after the success of The House of Mirth which had been published two years previously. The tale features American expatriates living in France, and contrasts new world simplicity and individual freedoms with old world family traditions and manipulation.

Madame de Treymes

Paris: Rainy Street – Gustave Caillebotte 1848-1894


Madame de Treymes – critical commentary

This is a story straight out the mould of Henry James – with hints of Balzac. Democratically open but young and maybe naive American honesty is pitted again tradition-bound European guile with its money-centric and snobbish exclusivity hiding behind a hypocritical veil of religious values. The situation also has a slightly Gothic tinge: an unhappy young woman, trapped in a loveless marriage to a corrupt husband, with very little chance of escape, is hounded by ruthlessly devious relatives.

The central conundrum with which one is left at the end of the tale is Madame de Treymes’ possible motive(s) for deceiving Durham? She understands and explains the family’s traditional and tightly controlled attitudes (fuelled by religious belief) towards divorce. This would be entirely in keeping with social conventions at the time, when the Catholic church frowned upon divorce with a force which was a de facto prohibition.

But this apparently religious objection to divorce has a much more material basis in French society, which was governed by the Napoleonic Code that kept inherited wealth and property concentrated into family units rather than freely distributed amongst individuals. This explains the reason why the Malrive family wish to trade Fanny’s son in return for the divorce. She can exercise her rights to a divorce under civil law, but they keep the son, theoretically united with his father, and thereby prevent any wealth passing out of the family.

The other possible source of her ambiguous motivation is that she is attracted to Durham. After all, she is unhappily married herself (like Fanny) although she does have a lover. But she keeps Durham guessing in a rather flirtatious manner. There is also the fact that Durham certainly spends far more time in the story discussing matters with Madame de Treymes than he does with his purported love object, Fanny de Malrive. But there is no substantial evidence in the text to support this notion, and the potential romantic connection between the two of them is not developed in any way.

Novella?

This is a long story – which leads a number of commentators to consider it as a novella. Edith Wharton was certainly attracted to and proficient in the novella as a literary genre, as her early work The Touchstone (1900) and more famous Ethan Frome (1911) demonstrate.

And the clash between American individualism and French family tradition is certainly a unifying factor amongst the various elements of the story. But there are too many loose ends and unresolved issues in the narrative to qualify it as a novella.

Monsieur de Malrive’s misdeeds are left unexamined, as are those of Monsieur de Treymes. Durham’s attempts to help Madame de Malrive presumably come to nothing (because of the stranglehold the Malrive family has over the conflict) and the potential relationship between Durham and Madame de Treymes fizzles out with everyone going their own way. There is simply not a sufficiently powerful enough resolution to events. It is a reasonably successful story, but it lacks the compression of theme, structure, events, and place which is common to successful novellas.


Madame de Treymes – study resources

Madame de Treymes The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Madame de Treymes The Works of Edith Wharton – Amazon US

Madame de Treymes Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Madame de Treymes Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Madame de Treymes The Descent of Man and Other Stories – Project Gutenberg

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Madame de Treymes


Madame de Treymes – plot summary

Part I.   In Paris, American bachelor John Durham pays court to unhappily married Fanny de Malrive, his friend from childhood. She expresses a great enthusiasm for the simplicity and openness of her native America, as distinct from the constricted and rule-bound society into which she has married. But she lives in France for the sake of being near her son.

Part II.   She argues that French society and her husband threaten to corrupt the boy. Durham offers to marry her after she has been divorced. She thinks her husband’s family will not agree to a divorce, but that her sister-in-law Madame de Treymes might help.

Part III.   Durham has been a childhood friend of Fanny, but meeting her again in France he finds her much more sophisticated. Visiting her a few days later with his mother and sisters, he first meets Madame de Treymes, who he also finds fascinating.

Part IV.   Durham applies to his cousin Mrs Boykin for information about the mysterious Madame de Treymes. But she and her husband are comically xenophobic, and very critical of Madame de Treymes, whose lover is a Prince with gambling debts.

Part V.   By giving money at a charity event, Durham is invited to the Hotel de Malrive, the austere family home of Fanny’s in-laws. There he realises the stifling forces of cold and hostile tradition he will be up against. However, Madame de Treymes is sympathetic to his case and agrees to dine with him.

Part VI.   At Durham’s suggestion, the Boykins are suddenly flattered to invite a French aristocrat to dinner. Madame de Treymes tells Durham that the family will not consent to a divorce, and reveals that she has borrowed family money which she cannot repay. Durham believes that this to repay her lover’s gambling debts, and she is offering to trade her influence in exchange for his money. He refuses her offer.

Part VII.   Durham accepts the defeat of his hopes, but then suddenly Madame de Treymes arrives with the news that the Marquis de Malrive has decided not to oppose the divorce. She claims it was Durham’s honourable and sensitive approach which has changed things. Durham is slightly sceptical.

Part VIII.   Durham goes to Italy, but returns to the news that a money scandal has engulfed Prince d’Armillac, the lover of Madame de Treymes. Durham tries to thank and repay Madame de Treymes for the good services she has rendered him, but she claims that she has already been repaid – without saying in what form.

Part IX.   Durham goes to England with his mother and sisters whilst the legal process of divorce takes its course. However, on a business trip back to Paris he meets Madame de Treymes at the Hotel de Malrive. She explains her admiration for his having refused to gain Fanny by paying for influence with the family. She also reveals that it was not her influence which changed the family’s attitude to the divorce.

Part X.   She confesses that the family want to claim Fanny’s son which they can do under French law, which puts the family first, before individuals. Her earlier offer of assistance was a deceit, because the decision had already been taken. Durham realises that even telling Fanny all this will destroy his chances of marrying her. But then Madame de Treymes takes pity on Durham and his plight and reveals that even her last argument about possession of the boy was a deceit as well. Durham leaves to tell Fanny the whole story, knowing his chances of marrying her are gone.


Madame de Treymes – Principal characters
John Durham an American in France (40)
Marquise Fanny de Malrive his childhood friend, neé Fanny Frisbee
Madame Christiane de Treymes Fanny’s sister-in-law
Mrs Bessie Boykin Durham’s cousin
Elmer Boykin her husband
Prince d’Armillac Madame de Treymes’ lover, a gambler

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


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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014


More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


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

Pomegranate Seed

November 15, 2013 by Roy Johnson

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

Pomegranate Seed first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on 25 April 1931. It was subsequently included in Edith Wharton’s collection of short fiction, The World Over (1936), and then in her collection, Ghosts, published in 1937, the last year of the author’s life.

Pomegranate Seed

original Saturday Evening Post illustration


Pomegranate Seed – critical comments

This is simultaneously a mystery tale, a ‘ghost story’, and more importantly a penetrating study in the psychology of jealousy. The mystery element is possibly the least important and successful, because once the authorship of the grey letters has been explained, there is very little more to say about the issue, and no reason to re-read the tale.

As a ghost story it is more successful. Even though there is no explanation of how the letters come to have been written by somebody who has died a year previously, they act as a convincing metaphor for the influence a former love object might still exert on someone from beyond the grave. This part of the story also meshes successfully with Charlotte’s inflamed jealousy over the puzzle of the letters and the effect they have on her husband. She is in fact quite correct in he supposition that they were written by a woman who is a ‘previous engagement’ in his life – since they are written by the woman to whom he was married for twelve years.

The rapid fluctuations in Charlotte’s feelings as she tries to interpret the evidence at her disposal is a very convincing portrayal of the agonies and uncertainties of jealousy – how trivial details are seized upon and magnified to enormous proportions in the search for emotional resolution, and how a hairsbreadth can sometimes separate an imagined betrayal from an insight into one which is all too real.

The title of the story Pomegranate Seed is an oblique reference to the Greek myth in which Persephone, the goddess of fertility, is abducted and taken to Hades, where she breaks her vow of abstinence by eating some pomegranate seeds. It is not too difficult to see the fertile Elsie Corder (who bears her husband two children) as this figure who eventually lures her former husband to join her in the afterlife. She has written to him regularly; her last letters are only two days apart; and the only word Charlotte can decipher in the last is “Come” – though it has to be noted that he does not read this letter, having already departed to join his dead first wife.


Pomegranate Seed – study resources

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

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

Pomegranate Seed Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Pomegranate Seed Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical – Amazon US

Pomegranate Seed 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

Pomegranate Seed


Pomegranate Seed – story synopsis

Part I.   Charlotte Gorse has been married to New York lawyer Kenneth Ashby for a year, following the early death of his first wife Elsie after twelve years together. Charlotte’s marriage has been successful, but she is puzzled by the regular appearance of a handwritten letter addressed to her husband which appears to upset him and change his mood, but about which he reveals nothing. On arriving home there is familiar grey envelope with spidery handwriting waiting in the hall.

Part II.   She assume’s the letters might be from some woman in her husband’s past, is very tempted to open the latest, but instead spies on him when he arrives home. On seeing him kiss the letter, she challenges him and demands an explanation. He claims it is a business letter and refuses to divulge the name of its author.

Part III.   Charlotte tries to be sympathetic to her husband’s obvious distress, but all she can see is that he is trying to be evasive. She proposes a holiday, but he says he cannot go. She continues to harass him with questions, and finally he agrees to the notion of a holiday.

Part IV.   Next morning he leaves a message saying that she should prepare for the holiday the very next day. Charlotte at first feels triumphant because she has prevailed over the influence of the ‘other woman’. She tries to contact her husband throughout the day – without success, because nobody knows where he is. Finally, she goes to see her mother-in-law, where she thinks he might have called. He is not there, so the two women go back to Charlotte’s house, where they find another grey letter waiting. Charlotte decides to open it, but neither she nor Mrs Ashby can read the faint and spidery handwriting. They conclude that the letters have been coming from Kenneth Ashby’s dead wife, from beyond the grave, and that they ought to telephone the police.


Principal characters
Kenneth Ashby a New York lawyer
Mrs Ashby his mother
Elsie Corder Ashby’s first wife, who is dead
Charlotte Gorse Ashby’s second wife

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014


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


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

Roman Fever

August 21, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Roman Fever (1934) is one of the most famous and frequently reprinted of Edith Wharton’s short stories. It first appeared in her collection of stories The World Over which was published in 1936.

Colosseum in moonlight

The Colosseum in moonlight


Roman Fever – critical comments

Daisy Miller

This story offers a satirical version of the theme treated by Henry James in his famous novella Daisy Miller. James’s heroine Daisy incautiously ventures out into the Colosseum at night, catches fever, and later dies. His story is one of unfulfilled promise and a life tragically foreshortened.

Edith Wharton’s use of the same scenario is lighter, more satirical, and it has a positive outcome in the creation of Barbara – who is mentioned but never appears in the story. Edith Wharton was a close friend of Henry James and knew his work well. In fact their literary styles are vaguely similar – though James focuses more intensely on the psychological complexities between his characters.

The Colosseum at Night

This image and mise en scene combines two cultural elements which contemporary readers might find puzzling. In the nineteenth century, European locations such as Paris, Rome, and Athens – anywhere south of the English Channel – represented places of general permissiveness and sexual license to visitors from Anglo-Saxon cultures. This included upper-class tourists from both Britain and America.

There was a great deal of what we would now call ‘sexual tourism’ which went along with the Grand Tour – and the levels of permissiveness increased the further south and east the journey progressed. Other works playing with the same theme include Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) and E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1905).

At the same time, female tourists on this journey would be expected to maintain the sort of standards which obtained in London and New York. Unmarried women would be chaperoned on all occasions, and certainly not allowed out late at night.

However, the excuse of seeing the Colosseum at night might give a single man and woman an excuse to be alone together – unsupervised. Hence the details mentioned in the story that special arrangements could be made to make the building accessible after its formal closing hours. Alida Slade reminds Grace that –

“It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed, it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You know that?”

Grace Ainsley met Alida’s fiancé Delphin Slade that night, and they had a sexual liaison that led to pregnancy. Her indisposition at the time was described as an ‘illness’, and within two months she was married to Horace Ainsley – just in time for the child (Barbara) to be passed off as a natural product of that union.

Parallels

The architecture of the story is underpinned by a number of very subtle parallels. Alida and Grace originally met each other in Rome many years ago, on a night with a full moon, as the night of the story is to be and as was the night of Grace’s meeting with Delphin.

The two women have daughters Jenny and Barbara who are also friends. They have gone off with Italian aviators and will probably fly back by moonlight. In other words, the daughters are doing the modern equivalent of what their mothers did. Moreover, the daughters too seem to be in competition for the same man – the aviator who is a Marchese, the Campolieri boy who is ‘one of the best matches in Rome’.

The parallels even reach further back in family history. For when Grace Ansley’s great aunt was in Rome many years before, she was also in competition with her sister for the love of the same man, and sent her out on a night-time expedition for a flower – which resulted in the girl’s death.


Roman Fever – study resources

Roman Fever - classics edition Roman Fever – Capuchin Classics – Amazon UK

Roman Fever - classics edition Roman Fever – Capuchin Classics – Amazon US

Roman Fever - NYRB edition Roman fever – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

Roman Fever - NYRB edition Roman fever – New York Review Books – Amazon US

Roman Fever - Norton edition Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

Roman Fever - Norton edition Edith Wharton Collected Stories – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Roman Fever - eBook Roman Fever – eBook at About.com

Roman Fever - Norton edition Roman Fever – free audioBook – Amazon UK

Roman Fever - Virago edition Roman Fever (and other stories) – Virago edition – Amazon UK

Roman Fever - Virago edition Roman Fever (and other stories) – Virago edition – Amazon US

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Roman Fever


Roman Fever – plot summary

Part I
Alida Slade and Grace Ansley, two middle-aged upper-class American women are sitting on the restaurant terrace of their hotel overlooking Rome after lunch. They have known each other for many years, and their daughters (who are also friends) have gone out for the afternoon.

The two women compare their own youthful experiences of Rome with those possible for young women of their daughters’ generation. They are ostensibly full of sympathetic understanding for each other, but actually there is an understated competition between them in matronly feeling and virtue.

Part II
A great deal of their concern centres upon the traditional worry of catching fever in Rome as a result of incautious excursions in public after sunset. Alida Slade suddenly recalls that Grace Ansley once caught a severe chill in such circumstances many years before.

Furthermore, she knows that Grace went out to meet Delphin Slade in the Colosseum at night, even though he had just become engaged to Alida herself. She even remembers the exact words of the letter inviting Grace to meet him there – because as she suddenly decides to reveal, she wrote the letter herself.

It is clear that the two women were in competition for the same man. Alida claims that she wrote the letter as a sort of joke – so that Grace would turn up at the Colosseum and be left wandering around alone late at night, waiting for somebody who wouldn’t turn up.

But Grace reveals that she replied to the letter and she did meet Delphin Slade, and they did visit the Colosseum by night. The two women are forced to acknowledge the full scale of rivalry and animosity between them.

They then revert to a form of competitive and patronising sympathy for each other. But Grace plays her trump card by obliquely revealing that her daughter Barbara was the product of this one night’s romantic liaison.


Principal characters
Mrs Grace Ansley a middle-aged American woman
Horace Ansley her husband
Barbara her daughter
Mrs Alida Slade a middle-aged American woman, and long term friend
Mr Delphin Slade Alida’s husband, a corporation lawyer
Jenny Alida’s 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


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 WhartonEdith Wharton’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: Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, Roman Fever, The Short Story

Sanctuary

January 30, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

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

Sanctuary


Sanctuary – critical comment

Structure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Freudian interpretation

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

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

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

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

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

Form

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

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


Sanctuary – study resources

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

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

Sanctuary - eBook edition Sanctuary – 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

Sanctuary


Sanctuary – plot synopsis

PART ONE

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

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

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

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

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

PART TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Video documentary


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

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


Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2014


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


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

Souls Belated

February 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

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

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

Souls Belated


Souls Belated – critical commentary

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

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

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


Souls Belated – study resources

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

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

Souls Belated - eBook edition Souls Belated – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

Souls Belated - eBook edition Souls Belated – AudioBook format at Gutenberg

Edith Wharton - biography Souls Belated – paperback edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Souls Belated


Souls Belated – plot summary

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

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

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

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

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


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

Souls Belated

first edition – cover design by Berkeley Updike


Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Video documentary


Other works by Edith Wharton

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014


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


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

Summer

August 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and plot summary

Summer was written in what Edith Wharton described as ‘a high pitch of creative joy’ in 1917, and was first published by D. Appleton later the same year. Wharton regarded it as a twin piece to her earlier novella Ethan Frome (1911) (and she even called it ‘my hot Ethan’). Like the earlier narrative the events of the story are set in a small, poor town in a remote part of New England.

Summer

Summer – critical commentary

Novella – or short novel?

It is often difficult to tell the difference between a short novel and a novella. The distinction cannot be measured in the number of words – and neither the novel nor the novella can easily be defined. But there is general agreement that a novella should be shorter than most novels – and that it should demonstrate a marked degree of unity of place, time, theme, action, atmosphere, and character. The novella also usually has some sort of unifying symbol(s) or metaphor(s). It usually compresses its themes into a shorter space by eliminating all superfluous incidents, having fewer characters, and concentrating on a central issue. Summer amply fulfils these requirements. It is approximately 50,000 words long – which is shorter than most full length novels.

Unity of place

Charity has been raised in the small rural town of North Dorner, and that is the location in which all the significant action takes place. Charity feels claustrophobically stifled by its intrusive small-minded parochialism and she years for a more sophisticated environment, even though she lacks the cultural knowledge or experience to define what that might be.

Her state of being is affected by two other locations which act as equal and opposite alternatives to her. When she visits the larger town of Nettleton with Harney she is very impressed by the shops, the soda-fountains, the hotels, and the restaurants which represent a more sophisticated level of existence. But the town also includes very negative elements. It is where her childhood friend has become more or less a prostitute, and the town also has a ‘doctor’ who acts as an abortionist. The town has attractions, but there appears to be a price to be paid for them for a girl such as Charity.

On the other hand, she knows she was born on the Mountain, and thinks that she can escape North Dormer by going back to her roots. But the Mountain hangs over her as a location of both her genetic origins and a source of social stigma. It is a place of poverty, lawlessness, and squalor – as she discovers when she goes back in search of her mother, who has died in abject poverty, apparently an alcoholic.

These are equally unacceptable alternatives, and it is mark of the coherence of the narrative that she opts for the realistic choice of staying in North Dormer with her new husband Mr Royall.

Unity of time

The story starts in the early summer and ends with the onset of autumn, and the events of the narrative are fairly continuous, with no leaps or breaks in the action. This is another sense in which the novella as a literary form is rather like the Greek ideal of classical tragedy – continuity of time, place, and unfolding of drama. Charity experiences youthful longing, her first taste of romantic love, initiation into sexual life, disillusionment, and ‘mature’ acceptance of reality – all within a few weeks.

Unity of characters

The entire narrative is focussed on three characters – Charity, Mr Royall, and Lucius Harney – who are locked in an emotional struggle. Charity wants a life larger than North Dormer seems to offer her, and she sees Harney as a potential for something more expansive and exciting. Her guardian Royall has his own designs on Charity, but he also has an over-riding concern for her ‘reputation’ and he sees Harney as an opportunistic interloper who wishes to take advantage of Charity whilst having his own future mapped out elsewhere – which turns out to be the case.

Harney comes into North Dormer as an outsider (he is a cousin of Mrs Hatchard) and is attracted to Charity. He establishes their secret ‘home’ together in the abandoned house, but he has no intention of pursuing their relationship beyond the temporary physical pleasure he enjoys with her. This is a crucial element in the cultural ambiance of small-town North Dormer – because Charity’s social reputation will be severely damaged if she is ‘tainted’ with the reputation of a sexual relationship with an outsider.

Her fate will be even worse if she has a child out of wedlock. This is why Royall’s intervention is the decisive factor. He offers her the protection of an unsullied reputation. She even has the outside chance to pass off the birth of her child as Royall’s rather than Harney’s, given that the conception and her marriage are so close together.

Unity of theme

What is the principal theme of Summer? It is a ‘coming of age’ story. Charity matures from a naive, romantic, and inexperienced girl to a young adult who has learned some difficult lessons and made realistic choices – all in the space of a few weeks. Between early summer and the onset of autumn she has rebelled against a parent figure, fallen in love, become sexually experienced, experienced emotional betrayal, and faced up to her problematic origins, before making a choice which represents a realistic compromise for her future.

Social movement

Charity’s story is also one of social aspiration. She has come from the desperate background of the social outlaws, drunks, and riff raff on the Mountain, and has a place in a small sleepy town in the middle of nowhere. Instinctively, she yearns for a more sophisticated and exciting milieu. But she has no education, no skills, and no social capital – except her good looks. These are never explicitly mentioned in the narrative, but since the two principal males find her attractive, it is reasonable to assume that they exist.

However, she knows that to trade on her sexual allure can easily lead to pregnancy and being trapped in an under-class of the socially stigmatised. She has the example of her childhood friend before her. So – eventually she marries into a very respectable middle class milieu – as the wife of a small town lawyer – which is quite an advance on her origins as the illegitimate child of an alcoholic

Loose ends

Royall’s desire to protect Charity and her reputation is a constant throughout the story, and is therefore credible as his motivation. But Wharton seems to fudge the conclusion somewhat. Royall makes no sexual overtures to Charity after they are married (although he has done so previously), and she does not reveal to him the fact that she is pregnant with Harney’s child. This would presumably be a grim emotional burden to Royall – though he might not be shocked by the news if the pregancy were to be revealed – though this is beyond the time frame of the novel.

There is also the issue of Royall’s adoption of Charity in the first place. He has sentenced her father for a serious crime (manslaughter) – but we are given no convincing reason why Royall should adopt the daughter at the criminal’s request – except, as the text suggests, as an act of charity, which provides an itonic link with her name.

In fact it is worth noting that her nominative identity is entirely shaped by Royall. She has been given her first name Charity by Royall and his wife ‘to commemorate Mr Royall’s disinterestedness in “bringing her down” [from the Mountain] and to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence’. And her surname (until she marries him) is not Royall at all, but Hyatt, as the people on the Mountain know only too well.


Edith Wharton's house - The Mount

Edith Wharton’s 42-room house – The Mount


Summer – study resources

Summer Summer – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Summer Summer – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Summer Summer – Bantam Classics – Amazon UK

Summer Summer – Bantam Classics – Amazon US

Summer Summer – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Summer Summer – free 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

Summer""


Summer – plot summary

Part I.   Charity Royall is a young woman in North Dormer, a small country town in New England. She works in the local library, is bored, and yearns for a life with more sophistication and excitement. A young architect Lucius Harney comes to the library in search of local history.

Part II.   Charity has been ‘brought down from the Mountain’ (a region of outlaws) by Mr Royall, a widower and lawyer who acts as her guardian. She feels sorry for him because he is so lonely, but he has made sexual advances to her – which she has scornfully rejected. She has taken up the job of part-time librarian in order to earn enough money to get away from the locality. When she makes this clear to Royall he proposes marriage – an offer she flatly refuses.

Part III.   Charity feels in need of protection, so at her request Royall hires a woman to live in the house and do the cooking. Royall reproaches Charity for leaving the library early, and she threatens to leave.

Part IV.   Lucius Harney returns to the library, whereupon Charity reproaches him for having criticised the condition of its books to the custodian Mrs Hatchard . He reassures her that he means no harm and suggests that he can improve ventilation of the building.

Part V.   Some time later woodcutter Liff Hyatt from the Mountain interrupts her summer musings. She tells him that Harney wants to sketch one of the primitive mountain houses. She wonders if she and Hyatt are related and ponders the identity of her mother. She promises to take Harney up to the Mountain and reveals to him that she was born there, suddenly feeling a certain pride in the fact.

Part VI.   Harney begins taking his meals in the Royall house, where they discuss the primitive and oppositional culture of the Mountain. Royall recounts visiting the mountain to retrieve a young girl from one of its drunken outlaws he has convicted. Charity overhears this account which turns out to be the story of her origins. She senses that Harney is interested in her but feels mortified by the cultural gulf that separates them. They visit some very poor people living in a primitive house near a swamp, which makes her feel ashamed of her origins.

Part VII.   Next day Harney arrives with the clergyman Mr Miles to discuss the ventilation of the library. Charity is disappointed that Harney seems less interested in her than the day before. She goes out at night to his lodgings and watches him in secret. But she fears disturbing him in case he thinks it is a signal of sexual submission which she does not want to provoke, knowing what its consequences would be in a small town.

Part VIII.   The following day Royall chastises her for having visited Harney’s house at night. He has seen the relationship between the two young people developing, and has suggested to Harney that he should leave (to protect Charity’s reputation). Royall once again proposes marriage to Charity. Harney arrives at the house to say an inconclusive goodbye – and next day sends her a message from a nearby village.

Part IX.   Charity starts seeing Harney again. He is friendly, but no more. Two weeks later they go to a fourth of July celebration in a larger town. Charity is impressed by urban novelties. Harney buys her a jewelled brooch and takes her to a french restaurant for lunch.

Part X.   They go on a boat trip around the local lake, then watch a spectacular firework display, during which they exchange passionate kisses. Charity sees a childhood friend who has become a tart in the company of her guardian Royall, with whom she has an angry confrontation.

Part XI.   The following morning, filled with shame about the incident, she runs away from home, heading back to the Mountain. But she is overtaken by Harney, who takes her to an abandoned house in the countryside.

Part XII.   Harney persuades her to return home, and they begin meeting each other every day in secret at the abandoned house. She becomes deeply enamoured of him.

Part XIII.   At some local celebrations Mr Royall makes an impressive speech on parochial fidelity. But Charity sees Harney with another woman in the audience and realises that she cannot compete with sophistication.

Part XIV.   Some days later she is waiting at the abandoned house when Royall appears. He asserts his right to keep her out of trouble. When Harney turns up Royall challenges them both with the question of marriage. Harney announces to Charity that he is going away but will marry her on his return.

Part XV.   Harney leaves for New York and is non-commital about his return date. Charity hears that he is due to marry Annabel Balch. She writes to him urging him to fulfil his commitment. She also fears that she might be pregnant, and visits a doctor (an abortionist) in the nearby town for confirmation. She thinks the child will give her a strong claim on Haarney, but he writes confirming that he is going to marry Miss Balch. Charity feels that escaping and going back to the Mountain is her only option

Part XVI.   Next morning she sets off with great difficulty for the Mountain, intending to seek out her mother. She is overtaken by Liff Hyatt and the clergyman Mr Miles who are also going to see her mother. When they arrive her mother has already died – in abject poverty and squalor. Her mother is buried, and Charity stays on, thinking to ‘rejoin her people’.

Part XVII.   But during the night she realises that she does not want her own child growing up amongst primitive and degenerate people – and she sets off to walk back home again. She is rescued by Royall, who has driven out to look for her. He makes his third proposal of marriage.

Part XVIII.   She feels a numb sense of relief at being protected by Royall. They are married in a simple ceremony, then retire to a hotel overlooking the same lake she visited with Harney. After retrieving her brooch from the abortionist (and being cheated by her) she writes to Harney saying she is married but will always remember him.


Summer – characters
Mr Royall a small town lawyer, a widower, and Charity’s guardian
Charity Royall his young ward, a librarian (her real name is Hyatt)
Mrs Hatchard custodian of the library
Lucius Harney Mrs Hatchard’s cousin, a young architect from New York
Verena Marsh Royall’s deaf cook
Liff Hyatt a mountain woodcutter, a relative of Charity’s
Mr Miles a clergyman
Dr Merkle an unscrupulous abortionist

Summer – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Wharton 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, social climbing, and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
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.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US


Edith Wharton – web links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2015


More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Edith Wharton, The Novella Tagged With: Edith Wharton, English literature, Literary studies, The Novella

The Age of Innocence

July 24, 2011 by Roy Johnson

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

The Age of Innocence (1920) is perhaps Edith Wharton’s most famous novel. It was written immediately after the First World War, when she had settled permanently to live just outside Paris. She takes as her subject three issues she knew very well from first-hand experience: old New York upper-class society of the 1870s, marriage, and divorce. She had been encouraged to take this as her material by her friend Henry James, who urged her to ‘do’ old New York. And like James she also included as a substantial fourth subject, the tensions between European and American culture.

The Age of Innocence

first edition dust cover 1920


The Age of Innocence – plot summary

Part I

Newland Archer is a rather conventional member of ‘old money’ New York society. He works half-heartedly in a legal firm and has just become engaged to May Welland, who is also a member of a respectable family. Into this group there suddenly appears Countess Ellen Olenska, an American who has separated from her Polish husband. Archer and his set try to arrange a dinner to integrate Ellen into New York society, but they receive refusals on the unspoken grounds that she is not respectable because of her tainted past. So her relatives appeal to one of the oldest families, the Van der Luydens, who invite Ellen to meet a visiting English Duke. The occasion is a social success, and it provides Ellen with the seal of approval she needs.

Edith Wharton - The Age of InnocenceArcher visits Ellen (at her request) and is impressed by her bohemianism and her radical attitudes. He feels increasingly stifled by the expectations of his family and what he sees as the dull predictability of the married life ahead of him. Almost unknown to himself, he is attracted to Ellen and what she represents as a free spirit. Archer is asked by his law firm to handle the case Ellen wishes to bring against her husband for divorce. New York society prefers to avoid such a scandal, and Archer is successful in managing to persuade her against the action.

When his fiancee May goes south for a winter holiday, Archer follows Ellen to a weekend in the country, but their intimacy is spoiled by the arrival of Julius Beaufort, of whom Archer feels jealous. Archer then abruptly visits May on her holiday, where he tries to convince himself that he still wants to marry her. He asks her to bring their marriage date forward. She wonders if there is somebody else in Archer’s life – and he is relieved to discover that she is thinking of someone in his distant past.

Returning to New York, Archer finally manages to arrange a private audience with Ellen, whereupon he declares his love for her. She reciprocates his feelings but argues that having provided her with his protective friendship, he should now stand by his engagement to May. She feels it would be dishonourable to take advantage of people who have shown her friendship. On returning home he receives a telegram from May announcing that she will marry him in a month’s time.

Part II

On his wedding day Archer is oppressed by the weight of expectancy and tradition that he realises marriage will entail. Even on his honeymoon he also realises that there is an emotional and intellectual gulf between himself and May – though he realises that she is likely to be a good and loyal wife.

He continues to be disturbed by visions of Ellen. He follows her to Boston where she has just turned down an offer to re-join her husband. Over a private lunch they agree that they must stay separate and love each other from a distance. Archer also meets Count Olenski’s emissary, who pleads that Ellen should remain in America, and reveals that Archer’s family now want her to return to her husband.

Beaufort’s bank crashes, which indirectly affects Archer’s family. At the same time the family dowager matriarch Mrs Mingott has a stroke. Ellen is summoned from a retreat in Washington to live with her and provide support. Archer proposes to Ellen that they should commit themselves to each other in some sort of alliance, but she refuses on the grounds that this would put them both outside society. She finally suggests to him that they spend just one night together before she returns to Europe.

The love tryst fails to materialize, and Ellen is given a send-off dinner, at which Archer realises that everybody believes that he and Ellen are lovers. This is their way of getting rid of the social problem without even officially recognising it. Archer has decided to follow Ellen to Europe, but when he attempts to confess all to May, she reveals that she is pregnant, and has told Ellen about it earlier.

Twenty-six years later, after a faultless life of public service, Archer is visiting Paris with his son Dallas, who has made an appointment to visit his relation Countess Olenska, who still lives on the Left Bank. Dallas reveals that his mother (as she was dying) told him about the relationship between Archer and Ellen. Archer despatches his son to meet Ellen, but does not go himself.


The Age of Innocence – study resources

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Cliff’s Notes study guide – Amazon UK

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – audioBook version at Gutenberg

The Age of Innocence The Age of Innocence – Kindle eBook edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK


Principal characters
Newland Archer a young well-to-do ‘gentleman lawyer’
Mrs Adeline Archer his old-fashioned mother
Janey Archer his sister, an old-fashioned virgin
Mr Welland an advanced valetudinarian
Mrs Welland May’s mother
May Welland Archer’s fiancee
Lawrence Lefferts adulterous man-about-town, friend of Archer
Mr Sillerton Jackson an authority on ‘old society’, ‘the drawing room moralist’
Miss Sophy Jackson his sister
Mrs Manson Mingott a rich and obese New York dowager matriarch
Lovell Mingott her son
Julius Beaufort an English banker of doubtful provenance
Van der Luydens old New York society family
Mrs Lemuel Struthers raffish nouveau riche
Duke of St Austrey shabby and comic English toff
Ned Winsett journalist on woman’s weekly magazine, friend of Archer
Mrs Thorley Rushworth Archer’s former married lover
Count Stanislas Olenski Ellen’s Polish husband
Marchioness Medora Manson Ellen’s flambouyant and eccentric aunt
Dr Agathon Carver a fashionable spiritualist
Mr Riviére personal tutor and emissary of Count Olenski

The Age of Innocence – Video

1993 adaptation by Martin Scorsese


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 at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book at 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 at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book at 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 at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Reef Buy the book at 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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2011


More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Edith Wharton Tagged With: American literature, Edith Wharton, Literary studies, The Age of Innocence, The novel

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