Edith Wharton PDF
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EDITH WHARTON Women Writers General Editors: Eva Figes and Adele King Published titles: Margaret Atwood, Barbara Hill Rigney Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Langland Charlotte Bronte, Pauline Nestor Emily Bronte, Lyn Pykett Fanny Burney, Judy Simons Willa Cather, Susie Thomas Emily Dickinson, Joan Kirkby Sylvia Plath, Susan Bassnett Christina Stead, Diana Brydon Eudora Welty, Louise Westling Edith Wharton, Katherine Joslin Women in Romanticism, Meena Alexander Forthcoming Jane Austen, Meenakshi Mukherjee Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Marjorie Stone Elizabeth Bowen, Phyllis Lassner Ivy Compton Burnett, Kathy Gentile George Eliot, Kristin Brady Mrs Gaskell, Jane Spencer Katherine Mansfield, Diane DeBell Christina Rossetti, Linda Marshall Jean Rhys, Carol Rumens Muriel Spark, Judith Sproxton Gertrude Stein, Jane Bowers Virginia Woolf, Clare Hanson Further titles are in preparation Women Writers EDITH WHARTON Katherine Joslin M MACMILLAN ©Katherine Joslin 1991 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33--4Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN EDUCATION LTD Houndmills. Basingstoke. Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by BP Integraphics. Bath. Avon British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Joslin, Katherine Edith Wharton.-(Women writer>) 1. Fiction in English. American writers. Wharton, Edith 1862-1937 I. Title II. Series 813.52 ISBN 978-0-333-40730-1 ISBN 978-1-349-21323-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21323-8 Contents Editors' Preface VI Acknowledgements VII 1 Edith Wharton's Life 2 Edith Wharton's Fiction 28 3 The House of Mirth and the Question of Women 49 4 The Custom of the Country and the Atlantic's Call 70 5 The Age of Innocence and the Bohemian Peril 89 6 The Mother's Recompense: Spectral Desire 108 7 Edith Wharton and the Critics 128 Notes 143 Bibliography 151 Index 154 v Editors' Preface The study of women's writing has been long neglected by a male critical establishment both in academic circles and beyond. As a result, many women writers have either been unfairly neglected or have been marginalised in some way, so that their true influence and importance has been ignored. Other women writers have been accepted by male critics and academics, but on terms which seem, to many women readers of this generation, to be false or simplistic. In the past the internal conflicts involved in being a woman in a male-dominated society have been largely ignored by readers of both sexes, and this has affected our reading of women's work. The time has come for a serious reassess ment of women's writing in the light of what we understand today. This series is designed to help in that reassessment. All the books are written by women because we believe that men's understanding of feminist critique is only, at best, partial. And besides, men have held the floor quite long enough. EvA FIGES ADELE KING VI Acknowledgements Many organizations and people have assisted me in my work on Edith Wharton. I am grateful to the Alumnae of Northwestern University for a fellowship that allowed me to travel to the Heinecke Library at Yale University to read Wharton's papers and to the staff at the Heinecke for their assistance in locating material. I am also grateful to Western Michigan University for a Faculty Research Support Grant that gave me time to complete this book. Many members of the Edith Wharton Society have also helped to guide my research and thinking about Wharton; I thank them all. Individually, I would like to thank Carl Smith, Harriet Gilliam, and especially Harrison Hayford at Northwestern University for their reading of early drafts of my material and Edward Galligan and Clare Goldfarb at Western Michigan University for their advice on sections of my later work. The comments and suggestions of Eva Figes and Adele King have greatly helped me give shape to my argument. I thank them both for their work. My special thanks go to my husband and colleague Thomas Bailey, whose culinary creations, no less than his literary insights, have sustained my work. Vll To my daughter Emily 1 Edith Wharton's Life I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say, "Please give me Edith Wharton's book," and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people. -Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance Edith Wharton awoke in the morning before her husband and guests. With the morning sun over her shoulder, free from the restricting stays of fashionable female clothing, she sat alone, propped upright in bed, writing page after page in pencil and tossing them to the floor. From as early as six to as late as eleven, each morning, every morning, she wrote novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel books, social and aesthetic commentary, autobiography and literary criticism. Her secretary collected the pages, arranged them, sent them to be typed, and returned them the next morning for revision; often Wharton revised five or six times before showing her work to others. During those same morning hours, as her friends marvelled, she ordered meals for the day, accepted phone calls, managed her large household with an eye to every detail. After a full morning of work, she faced the remainder of her day with equal energy. She dressed, wandered through her 1
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