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Edith Wharton
-
Standard Name: Wharton, Edith
Birth Name: Edith Newbold Jones
Married Name: Edith Newbold Wharton
EW
, early twentieth-century novelist of American nationality, upper-middle-class status and subject-matter, and European cultural interests, has suffered in critical estimation by being ranked second to her friend and contemporary Henry James
. Writing through the modernist period, she remained traditional in her techniques. Most of her stories revolve around the dilemmas faced by women in a society which offers them little while depending on their compliance. She produced non-fictional prose, short fiction, travel writing, autobiography, and letters as well as the novels for which she is best known. She is currently enjoying a boom in reputation.
Connections
| Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
|---|---|---|
| Friends, Associates | A. Mary F. Robinson | Their neighbours there included Edith Wharton
. Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press, 2003. 326 |
| Friends, Associates | Sybille Bedford | Introduced to Aldous Huxley
and his wife Maria
by the South African poet Roy Campbell
while at Sanary, the young SB
became their intimate friend. Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint, 2005. 249-50 |
| Friends, Associates | Hope Mirrlees | While living in Paris, Mirrlees and Harrison entertained visitors who included HM
's mother
(widowed in 1924), and Virginia
and Leonard Woolf
. Robinson, Annabel. The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison. Oxford University Press, 2001. 298 |
| Friends, Associates | Vernon Lee | VL
and Edith Wharton
met at Lee's Florence home, Il Palmerino. Wharton later called Lee the first highly cultivated and brilliant woman I had ever known. Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press, 2003. 184-5 |
| Friends, Associates | Lady Ottoline Morrell | LOM
's passion for creative gatherings was fostered on visits she made to the the home of Ethel Sands
and Nan Hudson
at Newington in Oxfordshire. She was deeply inspired by its lively intellectual... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Anita Brookner | Its male protagonist—still unusual for Brookner—is an academic, parent of a small daughter. His wife leaves him during the course of the story: though he idealises women, he does not achieve a successful relationship with... |
| Literary responses | Louisa May Alcott | Among a chorus of praise from those who read LMA
when they were young, Edith Wharton
stands out as harder to please. In her memoir A Backward Glance, 1934, she recalls how her mother... |
| Literary responses | Elizabeth Robins | A reviewer for the Nation complained of the novel's Edith-Wharton
-like deliberate, elliptical, smooth-spoken, post-Jacobite manner, which it judged too niggling and high-heeled for much real usefulness to American readers. Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Urgo, Joseph R.Editor , Broadview Press, 2003. 293 |
| Literary responses | Violet Trefusis | Michael Holroyd
suggests in the Afterword to A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters—Absent Fathers, 2010, that scholarly interest in Vita Sackville-West
created a biassed climate for the reception of VT
. Whatever vessel set... |
| Literary responses | Frances Hodgson Burnett | This book is said to have been particularly appreciated by later novelists Nancy Mitford
and Marghanita Laski
. The early twenty-first-century reprint was very well reviewed, and was likened to the work of Edith Wharton
. Persephone Books. |
| Literary responses | Sarah Waters | Waters says that while some of her lesbian readers felt angry or let down by her writing a book without lesbian content, this was the book that my 10-year-old self was destined to write. Allardice, Lisa. “Sarah Waters: ’Some of my readers really did hate me. They felt let down’”. theguardian.com. |
| Literary responses | Flora Macdonald Mayor | Rediscovery of FMM
was fostered by Sybil Oldfield
, who in 1984 published an extensive account of Mayor's life and works (which she narrated in parallel with those of Mayor's contemporary Mary Sheepshanks
). During... |
| Occupation | Eva Figes | EF
had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood
, Jane Austen
, Elizabeth Bowen
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
, Frances Burney
, Willa Cather
, Colette
,... |
| Reception | Willa Cather | WC
's own later comments on this book were somewhat grudging. It was conventional, she said, carefully arranged but unnecessary and superficial. Cather, Willa. On Writing. Tennant, StephenEditor , Alfred A. Knopf, 1949. 92 |
| Reception | Charlotte Perkins Gilman | The Yellow Wall-Paper, Women and Economics, and Herland all feature prominently in North American curricula, and also attract ongoing scholarly inquiry. Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond. Pantheon Books, 1990. 7 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Reading Gilman in the Twenty-First Century”. The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, Associated University Presses, 2000, pp. 209 -20. 211 |
Timeline
1861
A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...
23 October 1920
In his novelMain Street, Sinclair Lewis
excoriated the small-town life often represented in American literature as the backbone of national life.
26 September 1991
Elaine Showalter
published Sister's Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing , complement or sequel to her book of British women's literary history, A Literature of Their Own, 1977.