edith wharton

i'm pretty sure i'd like "ethan frome" too, why not?

it didn't quite hit me until a few days after i had finished it, actually.

*I saw that on TV, a bit - Winona Ryder was in it, I think. That movie version looked utterly terrible.

** I didn't think 'The Age of Innocence' was all that romantic - just because he liked the older mistress, so what, who cares? Because she was so pompous and all strong and stuff. How can you be romantically interested in someone who's 'strong'? What is that, 'strong'? It's like what people who don't read books talk about.

Rest of her books = not nearly so classic

Why all the Ethan Frome hate? Is it badly written? Plot telegraphed to seasoned reader? Out of her element writing about the simple folk? It's been twenty plus years since I read it, it was assigned reading in the other high school English class, but not in mine, maybe the grass is greener on the other side of the Program Office.

I'm reading "The Reef" and it is fantastically compulsive and exciting so far. It doesn't have the perfect tragic beauty of "The House of Mirth" but who knows? There are still a hundred pages to go.

Actually she fudges a couple of things so it's certainly not perfect but it is very, very good.

The only novel of hers that James liked without reservation...cuz it's Jamesian?

I don't see it any more so than others I've read except, perhaps, for a few slightly hard-to-swallow coincidences.

Actually it's quite similar to The spoils of Poynton but without the gnarly syntax.

age of innocence vs. house of mirth.

what should i read out of both?

edith snoreton

HOM.

The House of Mirth is sometimes my favourite book ever. I can take or leave TAoI, for the most part - it's well made but ultimately i don't care about the characters that much. THoM makes you care deeply about a greedy, superficial, manipulative woman with very few redeeming qualities. I think that's what is devastating about it.

a jaw-dropping section from Edith Wharton's The Touchstone which I read in the sunshine today. Glennard talking about a lover he spurned, a cebrated author(ess):

"Her dress never seemed a part of her ; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most approved models ; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated with the text.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair."

!

i was thinking about how great 'an emergency that had somehow become chronic' is but the capping sentence you quoted is...

Rereading The Age of Innocence on the beach is ideal: the roar of the Gulf serves the steady, absurdly poised rhythms of her sentences.

The Reef is one of the few American novels of that era to take as its subject a slightly older woman adjusting herself sexually to meet the demands of a slightly younger man.

I can't confirm that but I did like that book. It opens especially strongly.

edith snoreton

― Hungry4Ass, Friday, December 27, 2013 1:59 PM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

rly funny

Of the ones I've read, The House of Mirth > The Age of Innocence > The Custom of the Country - rankings based pretty much on my sympathies for the main characters; as far as the writing goes they are all stellar.

Some highlights from her wikipedia page:

Her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, and Edith obeyed this command.

In 1877, at the age of 15, she secretly wrote a 30,000 word novella titled Fast and Loose.

She eventually crossed the Atlantic 60 times.

Wharton was preparing to vacation for the summer when World War I broke out. Though many fled Paris, she moved back to her Paris apartment on the Rue de Varenne and for four years was a tireless and ardent supporter of the French war effort.

When the Germans invaded Belgium in the fall of 1914 and Paris was flooded with Belgian refugees, she helped to set up the American Hostels for Refugees, which managed to get them shelter, meals, and clothes, and eventually created an employment agency to help them find work. She collected more than $100,000 on their behalf.

On April 18, 1916, Raymond Poincaré, the then-President of France appointed her Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the country's highest award, in recognition of her dedication to the war effort.

She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer prize.

I agree with the ranking, though she's at her best with monsters. Her short stories are as pungent as the novels.

I'd add The Reef and Summer to the permanent list.

I've read every novel published during her Roaring Twenties best-seller run and have been consistently disappointed.

Yeah, I'd agree with that ranking, too. The House of Mirth exploded my brain the first time I read it.

They're so different from each other that I find them hard to rank. The Age of Innocence hits my heart the most. The House of Mirth is probably the best purely as a novel. The Custom of the Country is the best social portrait. And Ethan Frome is tops on some other metric I find hard to articulate -- vibiness?

She's so great.

Feels weird to crosspost from another thread but I'm just discovering Wharton and am smitten. So.

I sometimes think of a thing Wallace Stevens said (particularly around Christmas, when I want to run and keep running), that 'life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble'. Wharton said of her move to Hyères in Provence in 1922 (two years after *The Age of Innocence* was published) 'I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last'.

Wait till you get to her short fiction; she doesn't get enough praise for writing some of the most acerbic things in American lit.

This article about Morton Fullerton is bonkers: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n05/hermione-lee/gatsby-of-the-boulevards

From reading the Hermione Lee and R.W.B. Lewis bios (both recommended), I learned that Edith loved oral sex.

Go Edith. Apparently there's a fragment of a pornographic novel out there? Part of the Lewis bio maybe?

I guess it's kind of a cliche to call Age of Innocence *hot* but damn, it's hot. When they're in that darkened room, awaiting the creak and clop of the carriage. Christ.

This is Wharton writing of her affair with Morton Fullerton (after a day trip on the train to Senlis), which could easily run as a commentary on Archer/Olenska

I knew then, dearest dear, all that I had never known before, the interfusion of spirit & sense, the double nearness, the mingled communion of touch & thought.

It's a fragment called "Beatrice Palmato," in which a father eats out his daughter.

Well then.

earnest question, what do yall do with the antisemitism? she's a really good writer but man it's like...I mean a lot of the stuff you find written on the subject is from Jewish sources saying "here's how I manage Edith Wharton's antisemitism" but she really thinks her "portraiture" is super cute in this regard, it's plain, and it sucks.

Yeah, it sucks, emblematic of the time and often worse (have you read what she praised about Gatsby in a letter to Fitzgerald). I still love her.

Hmmm, are we talking about Rosedale here, because he is an interesting character at the end when he is like a mirror to Lily Bart in their common dreams of social ascension. Maybe I'm naive but I read him as a nouveau riche, and the fact that he was Jewish as secondary. He's depicted as calculating but also brutally honest, straight in his boots, loyal, potentially in love... At the very least, I would say that in terms of shades, it's not Trilby or The Golem. I haven't consulted yet what Alfred is referring to, but will take a look.

I was already glancing at this thread because I'm unsure what my choices are after reading TAoI and THoM. I'm not sure I'm ready for Custom of the Country, sounds like more of the same? Summer and Ethan Frome sound different, but potentially inferior? Or the shorter fiction as Alfred recommends, why not.

Go with The Reef too.

I would second that interpretation of Rosedale.

My own sense of Rosedale was that he was not a mirror of antisemitic sentiments within Wharton but rather a careful portrait of how the antisemitism of so-called high society had hardened his resolve to gain ascendance over those who unfairly excluded him based upon their imaginary superiority. The rich socialites he sought to cut down to size had earned his enmity through their own hurtful words and actions. This seemed plain to me in the novel.

And that old guard was increasingly dependent on parvenus like Rosedale for their money

Glimpes of the Moon got a nice-looking reissue.

In the end I went with Ethan Frome, I finished it two days ago and loved it. The plot can be summed up in three lines but the characterization, wintry atmosphere and intensity carry everything. I like how Ethan's introspection and pusillanimity are the agent of Mattie's demise. Even Zeena is a rare instance of a character both perfectly horrible and credible. Very nice adaptation of a classical theme (sacrifice of love and youth). And yes, exquisite prose.

His wife had said: “If you don't give her up I'll throw myself from the roof.” He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof

'Summer' should be in the feminist canon - subcategory 'how it sucked to be female at any given period and location'. She does give the ending a positive spin - Royall offering her respectability, not asserting his conjugal rights, she keeps the baby, perhaps the best thing that could have happened in the circumstances. Still, it hits like a gut punch.

Summer >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Ethan Frome

I'll try the short stories next, per your recommendation, then The Reef.

Some of her short stories ("The Mission of Jane" I'm looking at you) make it seem like she's examining her characters as though they're beetles in a specimen jar, and her characters behave the same way towards each other - especially the men towards the women. It's entirely lacking in humanity or sympathy or understanding or fellow feeling. And then because I'm reading with a critical 21st century eye all these weird social mores and sexist attitudes and wondering how much she sees of the water she's swimming in, in particular whether her own dismissal of women is ironic or sincere, I feel like I'm doing the same. Examining her in a specimen jar as she's examining her characters in a speciman jar as they're examining each other... it's not pleasant!

Wait till you read Custom of the Country.

I have! I vaguely remember the characters were less likeable than those in The House of Mirth or the Age of Innocence but I still enjoyed it.

I like that line from "The Mission of Jane": "Politeness gushed from him in the driest season."