I've fallen in love, readers!It took me about 12 hours from start to finish to read the last of Wharton's novels, left unfinished for decades and then completed in Wharton's style by scholar Marion Mainwaring. As I mentioned earlier, I've watched the PBS series three times now and there's somethi...
This will end up being a review of The House of Mirth, sort of.“Wasn’t she too beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress? It makes her look like the real Lily – the Lily I know.” p.142Let’s begin with rich, beautiful people. I am neither, and I come from a long line of ne...
Wharton's antiwar masterpiece, now once again available, probes the devastation of World War I on the home front. Interweaving her own experiences of the Great War with themes of parental and filial love, art and self-sacrifice, national loyalties and class privilege, Wharton tells an intimate an...
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then write essay...
When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to be married to her cousin May Welland, "that terrifying product of the social system he...
Se Jane Austen affermava di lavorare con un pennello su un piccolo pezzetto d’avorio, Edith Wharton, secondo me, avrebbe potuto benissimo affermare che lei lavorava, intagliava, lucidava, una gemma d’ambra. I libri scritti dall’autrice americana sono dei veri piccoli gioielli, molto spesso brilla...
"Fast and Loose" was Edith Wharton's first novel, started when she was 14 and finished at 15. While she meant to keep it private (it was written for the amusement of a close friend), its publication here with "The Buccaneers" - her final, unfinished novel - gives insight into the major preoccupa...
When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her rebellious independence and passionate awareness of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland Archer, already engaged to be married to her cousin May Welland, "that terrifying product of the social system he...
Readers of The Buccaneers, The House of Mirth, and the recently filmed The Age of Innocence may be surprised to learn that Edith Wharton, known for her elegant narrative style, described herself as someone with an "intense Celtic sense of the supernatural". As a "ghost-feeler", she wrote a number...
"Bunner Sisters," written in 1892 but not published until 1916 in Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyv...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) These three brilliantly wrought, tragic novellas explore the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton's characters. Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous works; it...
Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his case. It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find himself again in his old brown room in Washington Square. It was hardly there that he had ...
When at last he found her alone in her sitting-room it was with a sense of liberation so great that he sought no logical justification of it. He simply felt that all their destinies were in Miss Painter's grasp, and that, resistance being useless, he could only enjoy the sweets of surrender. ...
Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and steel statuett...