Edith Wharton

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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.
Monochrome cabinet photograph of Edith Wharton, taken by E. F. Cooper, at Newport, Rhode Island. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. She is seated looking at the camera, in a jacket with leg-of-mutton sleeves and tight bodice, with a fall of lace in front, and a small hat with two feathers sticking up. She has two little dogs on her lap.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
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.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
Textual Production Anita Brookner
In the early 1980s AB did a good deal of reviewing of literary works for the Times Literary Supplement.
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan.
9-11
In 1988 she edited her own selection, with introduction, of The Stories of Edith Wharton
Textual Features Anita Brookner
The novels have been said to owe more to the French tradition than to the English—though French critics have read her as belonging to an English women's tradition, while English reviewers have cited most frequently...
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 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. http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/.
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. Editor Tennant, Stephen, Alfred A. Knopf.
92
When she wrote it she thought it a great thing that the...
Textual Features Rebecca Harding Davis
Frances has a strong sense of self, yet she wastes her life and talent pandering to the tastes of the upper classes and sacrificing herself for the sake of her son. Through a character named...
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 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.
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, pp. 209-20.
211
Judith A. Allen 's The Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Susan Hill
SH gives free rein to her enjoyment of list-making. Writers mentioned (not in a list or lists) include E. Nesbit (read by Noel Coward on his deathbed), Pamela Hansford Johnson and her husband C. P. Snow
Textual Production Q. D. Leavis
In her essays, reviews, introductions, and lectures, QDL also developed varied critiques of such authors as Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot , Charlotte Yonge , Marie Corelli , Edith Wharton , Naomi Mitchison , Amabel Williams-Ellis
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.
184-5
Textual Production Penelope Lively
PL has published introductions to works by other writers including Ivy Compton-Burnett , Edith Wharton , Willa Cather , and Carol Shields . In September 2015 she reviewed Alison Light 's Common People: In Pursuit...
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...

Timeline

1861: A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued...

Writing climate item

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 novel Main Street, Sinclair Lewis...

Writing climate item

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:...

Writing climate item

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.

Texts

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. D. Appleton-Century, 1934.
Wharton, Edith. A Son at the Front. D. Appleton, 1923.
Wharton, Edith. Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verse. Scribner, 1909.
Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1911.
Wharton, Edith. Fighting France. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1915.
Wharton, Edith. Madame de Treymes. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1907.
Wharton, Edith. Old New York. D. Appleton, 1924.
Wharton, Edith. Tales of Men and Ghosts. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1910.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. D. Appleton, 1920.
Wharton, Edith. The Buccaneers. Editor Lapsley, Gaillard, D. Appleton-Century, 1938.
Wharton, Edith. The Cruise of the Vanadis. Editor Lesage, Claudine, Sterne, 1992.
Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1913.
Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1897.
Wharton, Edith. The Gods Arrive. D. Appleton, 1932.
Wharton, Edith. The Greater Inclination. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1899.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1905.
Wharton, Edith. The Reef. D. Appleton, 1912.
Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925.
Wharton, Edith. Verses. C. E. Hammett, Jr, 1878.
Wharton, Edith. Xingu and Other Stories. Macmillan and Co., 1916.