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
Textual Production Timberlake Wertenbaker
Writing for these genres as well as for the stage, TW often revisits and reshapes the work of earlier writers. She wrote the screenplay for The Children, a Film Four International production (1990) adapted...
Textual Production Mary Webb
In LondonMW wrote reviews for The Spectator and the Bookman, and published some stories in The English Review.
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press.
28-9
Her final literary work, a review of a novel by Edith Wharton ...
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 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...
Textual Production Flora Annie Steel
FAS wrote an adaptation of Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night's Dream (or more probably of part of it) to be acted by her younger grandson and the young Henry John . Her biographer Violet Powell...
Textual Features Ali Smith
The volume features 101 different women writers, each publication emblematic of the year for which its author is featured. Its contents range from the title-inspiring Miles Franklin 's My Brilliant Career (1901) through Edith Wharton
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...
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
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 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)
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...
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...
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 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
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

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.