Edith Wharton: A Collection Of Critical Essays

In this collection of criticisms, Edith Wharton’s unique gifts as a story-teller and her superb talents as a craftsman are carefully evaluated. Her indebtedness to Henry James is re-examined. Her more notable novels, such as The Age of Innocence, which won a Pulitzer prize, The House of Mirth, her masterful social portrait, and Ethan Frome, her tale of New England poverty and frustration, are among the works reappraised.

Society in Edith Wharton’s old New York, at once sophisticated and provincial, dreaded scandal more than disease. Its refinement was a veneer, its conversation mere gossip, its standards double. Society performed conventional rites; intellectual winds seldom stirred the sands of this wasteland. Edith Wharton, placed in this milieu by birth and marriage, turned it into a subject for subtle satire.

Though she was no rebel, Edith Wharton was fascinated by rebellion. She regarded pessimistically those who challenged social mores, pointing always to the exorbitant price exacted for the assertion of individual thought. She distrusted human nature and saw the human condition as a struggle between the generous and the mean. She believed that self-sacrifice is almost invariably useless.

In this study of the woman and the artist, Irving Howe has included articles by Diana Trilling, E.K. Brown, Alfred Kazin, and Percy Lubbock. Here is Edith Wharton, the literary pioneer who pointed the road to realism, the social historian with enormous powers of recreation, the fine observer of emotions. This anthology should serve to enlarge Edith Wharton’s appreciative audience and to reassert her influential place in American writing.

Among the essays are:

Justice to Edith Wharton (Edmund Wilson)
Henry James’s Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton (Q.D. Leavis)
The Morality of Inertia (Lionel Trilling)
Our Literary Aristocrat (Vernon L. Parrington)
Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks (Louis Auchincloss)