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 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.
Hilary Mantel
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...
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. Editor Urgo, Joseph R., Broadview Press.
293
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...
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.
298
The two women were acquainted with Edith Wharton , Dorothy (Strachey)
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
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...
Friends, Associates A. Mary F. Robinson
Their neighbours there included Edith Wharton .
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press.
326
Maurice Barrès , a close friend with whom AMFR 's correspondence was posthumously published, was a French politician holding fairly extreme nationalist views. Daniel Halévy , editor...
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...

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