Photos: At Edith Wharton’s House, James Baldwin Receives His Due

Kate Bolick and Darryl Pinckney
at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts on Sept. 17, 2015.

In a moment of literary serendipity last Thursday, one writer in The Library of America series was honored at the home of another when James Baldwin was the subject of a public program at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s former estate in western Massachusetts. Darryl Pinckney, editor of the forthcoming LOA collection James Baldwin: Later Novels, joined journalist and critic Kate Bolick for a talk on contemporary race relations and how Baldwin’s writings continue to resonate in twenty-first-century America. The conversation kicked off the latest season of “Touchstones at the Mount,” an ongoing series of author talks hosted by Bolick.

By coincidence, James Baldwin: Later Novels will be published one week from today–on the same day as Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s, the fifth installment in The Library of America edition of Wharton’s collected works.

In addition to editing the forthcoming Baldwin volume for The Library of America, Pinckney is the author of the novel High Cotton and the nonfiction works Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature and Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy. Bolick, a contributing editor for The Atlantic, is the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own, a combination of memoir and cultural criticism that includes a lengthy consideration of Edith Wharton’s life and work.

Darryl Pinckney (holding James Baldwin: Later Novels)
and Kate Bolick at The Mount
in Lenox, Massachusetts on Sept. 17, 2015.

Watch Readers’ Almanac in the weeks ahead for more on both James Baldwin: Later Novels and Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s.

Photographs courtesy of The Mount.

Related posts:

• James Baldwin, resurgent on screen and on the page in 2015
• Wendy Wasserstein: Edith Wharton’s “desire to love & to look pretty”
• Is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence the greatest novel about New York?

Wendy Wasserstein: Edith Wharton’s “desire to love & to look pretty”

Born sixty-three years ago, on October 18, Wendy Wasserstein (author of such plays as the The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig) was taken from us much too soon. In 2001 she was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy and had to scale back her speaking engagements and workload. Then, in 2007, after battling lymphoma, she died at the age of 55.

First page of Wendy Wasserstein's speech,
found in the LOA files. (Click to enlarge.)

While organizing a trove of files for the Library of America archives, we came across the typescript for a speech by Wasserstein, with her handwritten notes over each of its three pages. A decade ago, on April 8, 2002, Wasserstein was one of six prominent writers who delivered a few remarks at the LOA’s twentieth-anniversary celebration, which took place at the The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. Joining her on the stage were Gail Buckley, Michael Cunningham, Elmore Leonard, Richard Price, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The presenters were asked to speak about writers from the LOA series for whom they feel a special affinity. Wasserstein chose Edith Wharton, and her remarks appear below. (She opened with a reference to Henry Adams, the subject of Schlesinger’s comments.)

* * *

I think, I hope, that Henry Adams would be happy. I’m going to talk about Edith Wharton tonight, but first I want to say that Terrence McNally came by my house yesterday and he saw my shopping bag from The Library of America full of books and he said to me, “They are the best publishers of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, and I can’t tell you how much those volumes have meant to me.” So he was very jealous at first when he saw the shopping bags and then when he saw it was Edith Wharton, he calmed down.

The other thing I want to apologize a little bit for is my speech; I currently have Bell’s palsy and I was thinking tonight, what would an Edith Wharton character do in this case? And I thought Undine Spragg would think, who’s on the guest list tonight, and should I come there to be socially and literarily ambitious? And then I thought May Welland would have done the proper thing and taken to her bed. So actually what I do at most times in these cases is consult Edith Wharton herself. I actually have a letter of Edith Wharton’s that I keep above my desk, and I will read this letter to you. It is a letter she wrote after she received a request from the American Women’s Pen Association. She answered them:

Dear Madam,
I have received your kind note in behalf of the League of American Pen Women inviting me to the authors’ breakfast which you are to hold in April in Washington. Unfortunately, I had to postpone my visit to America and see no way of my being there this spring. Would you kindly tell your committee how much I am gratified by their invitation and how greatly I regret being unable to accept it. Please believe me.
Yours truly,
Edith Wharton

So in my mind, Edith Wharton did what she really wanted to do. Following Edith’s lead, my feeling was, I really wanted to come to The Library of America tonight, and therefore am here.

Future generations of readers have benefited from Edith Wharton’s ability to write “believe me” letters and stay home to write. Edith Wharton’s life spanned two centuries. She was born in 1862 in New York, and died in 1937. She lived in Paris for the last three decades of her life as an ex-patriot. Looking over her work in Library of America editions, what is remarkable is how prolific she was. She was the author of more than 40 published volumes, including novellas, poetry, war reporting, travel writing, and books on gardens and house décor. Recently, we’ve come to know Edith Wharton as almost an American Jane Austen, a basis for Merchant-Ivory and Martin Scorsese period films. Her works have become the costume dramas of a kind of Masterpiece Theater cinema. But if you read Edith Wharton, it’s far deeper and richer than that.

I first came across Edith Wharton when I was in high school. I frankly had no idea that there was a New York woman writer of that era who had written so much and written so well. In high school we had read Jane Austen. But we had never read Flannery O’Connor or very many other American women novelists, and on top of that I went to a women’s high school. I found Edith Wharton on my own actually, in Scribner’s bookstore. And when I came across her that first time, I read The House of Mirth, and I was amazed by it. I thought, I can’t believe someone did this and got the city so well, and pictured it so acutely, and I also remember thinking, I can’t wait until I’m older and I really know that this is right. And I read her again in college, The Age of Innocence, and again I went to a women’s college, and we weren’t really studying very many women writers then either.

And so Edith Wharton became more and more of a beacon light to me. As I read more Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, those authors who were thought to know about class and money, to my mind Edith Wharton knew just as much and more. To my mind, she was like Chekhov, because she knew about a society in which class was changing. She knew about a society, beginning with details like spoons and forks, place-cards, and suddenly expanding to the much larger aspects of life and how that society was changing. As I began writing plays, Edith Wharton’s knowledge of a New York dinner party seemed to me like Chekhov’s knowledge of afternoons at a Russian dacha, and who came to sit and have tea and how things changed regarding love and marriages, all beginning with those smaller moments.

What I came across as I was looking through Edith Wharton in the Library of America collection was the autobiographical fragment [“Life and I”] that had never been previously published, and I’m just going to read a little bit of this to you because I thought it was extraordinary. It begins:

My first conscious recollection is of being kissed in Fifth Avenue by my cousin Dan Fearing.

It was a winter day, I was walking with my father, & I was a little less than four years old, when this momentous event took place. My cousin, a very round & rosy little boy, two or three years older, was also walking with his father; & I remember distinctly his running up to me, & kissing me, & the extremely pleasant sensation which his salute produced. With equal distinctness, I recall the satisfaction I felt in knowing that I had on my best bonnet, a very handsome bonnet made of a bright Tartan velvet with a white satin ground, with a full ruffling of blonde lace under the brim. Thus I may truly say that my first conscious sensations were produced by the two deepest-seated instincts of my nature—the desire to love & to look pretty.

She then goes on to say that that yearning to be pretty was not vanity, but rather an idea to look at the world as harmoniously composed. And I thought that yearning for both love and prettiness could be discarded in a politically correct manner of the writing of a privileged woman, or you could look at it in another way, of a woman actually telling the truth, and saying that this is what I see in this world. And as I look at photos still in style pages, on party pages, documenting life in New York, I think, Edith Wharton knew somewhere there is a subtext of looking for love and wanting to look pretty. And it’s an honor to talk about her tonight. Thank you very much.

Previously on Reader’s Almanac
Elmore Leonard: John Steinbeck “set me free”
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: Henry Adams's predictions for the future

Celebrate the centennial of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton began writing Ethan Frome as an exercise to improve her grasp of idiomatic French while she was living in Paris in 1907. Set aside for several years, it was the source of great pleasure when she returned to it in 1910, as she recalled in A Backward Glance (1934):

The book to the making of which I brought the greatest joy and the fullest ease was Ethan Frome. For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my time, and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett.

She seemed bemused by what she was creating, writing to Bernard Berenson that the story had become:

That ridiculous nouvelle, which has grown into a large long-legged hobbledoy of a young novel. 20,000 long it is already, and growing. I have to let its frocks down every day, and soon it will be in trousers!

Wharton completed the work early in 1911, and it was serialized in the August through October issues of Scribner’s Magazine. She made further revisions and corrections in the proofs for the book, which was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons on September 30.

The publication of A House of Mirth in 1905 had caused a sensation and by 1911 Wharton had developed a devoted following—but Ethan Frome was something different: a frame-tale of marital unhappiness, with an ending of shattering violence, as biographer Hermione Lee describes:

For readers more familiar with The House of Mirth or The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome comes as a shock, and this is not just because of the dramatic switch from her usual territory to the remote hills and poor farmers’ lives of nineteenth-century New England. What is just as startling is its quietness, what Henry James admiringly called its “kept-downness.” Ethan Frome is a story of silence and speechlessness. Voices and feelings are all “snowed under.” (The first French translation, which she oversaw, was titled Sous la Neige.) The characters live inside “dumb melancholy” and “secretive silence,” broken by sudden outbursts of long-repressed emotion.

Shortly after publication, Wharton was  indeed delighted to receive Henry James’s assessment:

I exceedingly admire, sachez Madame, Ethan Frome. A beautiful art & tone & truth—a beautiful artful kept-downness, & yet effective cumulation. It’s a “gem”—& excites great admiration here.

Another fan, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote her that the novel was “one of the most powerful things you have done.”

Ironically, many reviewers praised Ethan Frome specifically because they found it so unJamesian. The reviewer for The Nation wrote “we might have been reasonably content to rank her as the greatest pupil of a little master, were it not for the appearance of Ethan Frome.” And in Current Literature: “She has long been supposed, as the New York Sun puts it, to worship Henry James on her knees. Now, says that paper, she is standing on her feet.”

Other reviewers, however, like England’s Saturday Review, found the ending too upsetting: “Having read the story, we wish we had not read it. The error is in the end. There are things too terrible in their failure to be told humanly by creature to creature.”

Initial sales were slow, just 4,000 copies by mid-November and Wharton complained to her publisher, Charles Scribner, about the lack of advertising, poor distribution, and bad typesetting. Scribner responded by pointing out that fiction of a nonstandard length was always unpopular and unprofitable. Wharton would have her revenge, satirizing him in Hudson River Bracketed (1929) as the publisher Mr. Dreck who “didn’t know a meaner length” than forty-five thousand words.

Of course, selling well is the best revenge and the story has proved one of the most popular of Wharton’s works and over the years has been adapted for stage, television, film, and opera.

Also of interest:

• Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Is The Age of Innocence the greatest novel about New York?, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Another Wharton work from 1911, “Xingu,” was a previous Story of the Week

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings (includes Ethan Frome)

Liesl Schillinger on what to reread this summer and why

Guest blog post by Liesl Schillinger, New York-based writer, literary critic, and creator of the whimsical neologisms blog wordbirds

I’m about to go on my first true vacation this year, to an island in the middle of a lake where there’s no Internet and no electricity. In the daytime, our light comes from the sun; at nightfall, from oil lanterns whose glow extends halfway across our birch-bough beds. As a literary critic, I read at all times; but on holiday, I indulge in the pleasure of rereading. And since the Adirondacks (where I’ll be) are steeped in this country’s mythic past, I’ll be bringing American authors with me to reread. Here are the ones I’ll be dipping into, while the light lasts:

Edith Wharton. When I first read Wharton’s The House of Mirth, at 16, I loved this book and rued Lily Bart’s cruel fate. Reading it decades later, I was struck instead by the cruelty of Wharton’s social world and by her heroine’s bottomless venality. Wharton’s Collected Stories tend to be breezier and better-humored than her longer work (though still a little wicked), and I’ll be diving back into them—particularly “Charm Incorporated,” a story about a businessman who marries a beguiling immigrant whom the reader imagines to be a gold-digger, but who in fact rescues her husband’s fortunes.

John Dos Passos. What Carl Sandburg did with poetry for Chicago, Dos Passos did with prose for New York. In his tour de force, Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos wrote with striking, cinematic visual imagery, using dialogue (mostly) to convey a living, breathing portrait of Manhattan in the first two decades of the last century. Though Dos Passos includes the wealthy among his characters, he gives unusual voice to working American men, women and immigrants. Like Sandburg, who defended ordinary citizens in his long cycle, The People, Yes, Dos Passos championed the working man, and he ought to be more forcefully championed by those who admire Hemingway, Steinbeck and the modern novel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many people reread The Great Gatsby. But the Fitzgerald novel that haunts me is Tender Is the Night, in which he transmits love’s poignancy more evocatively than just about anyone else. And his passage about Nicole’s Paris shopping trip is my favorite run-on sentence of all time: “For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve . . .” Best read when one is far from toil . . . say, on a dock in the afternoon, as the first gin and tonics come around.

Kurt Vonnegut. Growing up in Indiana (Vonnegut’s home state), I got to take an eccentric class in high school devoted to Vonnegut’s oeuvre—taught by a wry, obese teacher who resembled (I thought) Vonnegut’s portly “Mr. Rosewater.” I must have read Cat's Cradle—Vonnegut’s parable of connection and empathy in the age of mass destruction—five times. I have also reread Slaughterhouse-Five, his stories Welcome to the Monkey House, and even his wacky, cartoon-filled Breakfast of Champions. His books are mosaics studded with fertile, glinting thoughts and images, always worth poring over again, always producing a fresh impression.

Anne Tyler. I consider some of the novels Anne Tyler wrote in the 1970s and 1980s to be American classics: Searching for Caleb, The Accidental Tourist, and, my favorite, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (about a dysfunctional family, before that term came into wide use). Understated humor runs through her books like a stream among the rushes: in one novel, a woman drives a car that’s missing a door; after she parks it, another character rips an ad from a magazine and tapes it to the frame: "Wouldn’t You Really Rather Have a Buick?" Later, she pops a piece of candy into her mouth from a bowl on a coffee table, only to realize it’s made of glass. This is American vision, American nuance, told in American language. And even Tyler’s sharpest observations have a generous, merciful quality to them, elevating her writing above satire or tale-telling.

John Updike. Rabbit runs, Rabbit gets reduxed, and Rabbit is reread; but the Updike novel I’m drawn to over and over is his stately retelling of the American century through the multi-generational saga In the Beauty of the Lilies. Written in 1996, this book begins in the rural, decent small-town America we associate with Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, and progresses relentlessly but organically to the media-oversaturated 90s, by which time an uncentered population has lost its context, and a neglected boy (who is nonetheless somebody’s son) joins a Waco-like cult, and shakes off its spell too late. The confident breadth of Updike’s span inspires awe. It’s an ideal book to wrap up at sunset . . . before returning for reassurance and warmth to the companionship of friends and family around the campfire.

Also of interest:

• The Guardian helps you plan your summer "greatest non-fiction" reading, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• After a vacation a few years ago Liesl Schillinger compiled a musical playlist inspired by her reading
• Listen to Carl Sandburg read “The people, yes, the people”

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels, Novellas, Stories, and Other Writings; John Dos Passos: Novels 1920-1925; Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems; Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973

A controversial Pulitzer Prize brings Edith Wharton and Sinclair Lewis together

In June 1921 Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. The Columbia trustees praised Wharton’s twelfth novel for its “wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Wharton wondered whether they had really understood it. And the decision was not without controversy.

The three fiction judges—literary critic Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature professor Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland—voted to give the prize to Sinclair Lewis for his epic satire Main Street, but Columbia University’s advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, overturned their decision and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence. (Pulitzer had originally stipulated that the award be bestowed on the novel that best represented the “whole atmosphere of American life,” but Butler had changed the wording to “wholesome.”) Outraged, Sherman and Lovett protested the decision in the pages of The New Republic.

Lewis was also furious but, as a longtime admirer of Wharton, he wrote her a gracious, congratulatory letter. Wharton responded from France with great warmth and appreciation of Lewis's work:

When I discovered that I was being rewarded—by one of our leading Universities—for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair. 

Subsequently, when I found the prize shd (sic) really have been yours, but was withdrawn because your book (I quote from memory) had “offended a number of prominent persons in the Middle West,” disgust was added to despair.

Wharton found Lewis’s kind words:

the first sign I have ever had—“literally”—that “les Jeunes” at home [at thirty-six, Lewis was twenty-three years younger than Wharton] had ever read a word of me. . . Some sort of standard is emerging from the welter of cant & sentimentality, & if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save Fiction in America.

Wharton invited Lewis and his wife to visit her home the Pavillon Colombe at St. Brice, and they did so in October. A few weeks after the visit, Lewis wrote to ask if he could dedicate his next novel, Babbitt, to Wharton. “Dear Mr. Lewis,” she responded, “I am a little dizzy! No one has ever wanted to dedicate a book to me before--& I’m so particularly glad that now it’s happened, the suggestion comes from the author of Main Street.” In 1923 the judges made Babbitt their choice for the Pulitzer, but the decision was again overturned, this time in favor of Willa Cather’s war novel One of Ours.

Lewis would finally win the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith in 1926 but he refused to accept it. His note of refusal took particular objection to the Pulitzer being given to the novel that “best presents the wholesome atmosphere of American life.” A few years later, the trustees of the prize reverted the description back to “whole atmosphere of American life.”

Over the ensuing years Wharton and Lewis continued to correspond, but, as Wharton biographer Hermione Lee notes, “each of them became less enthusiastic about the other.”

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence the greatest novel about New York?
• Moved by a story, Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time
• Ninety years after publication, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street still resonates with readers

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels (includes The Age of Innocence); Sinclair Lewis: Main Street and Babbitt

Is Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence the greatest novel about New York?

Writing in New York Magazine earlier this month, Sam Anderson made the case that the “best novel about New York” is not one of the “encyclopedic ambition bombs that attempt to capture, New Yorkily, the full New Yorkiness of New York”—he puts Manhattan Transfer, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, Invisible Man, Winter’s Tale, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in this category. Instead, Anderson finds that “the single greatest New York novel is the exact opposite.”

[The Age of Innocence] builds itself, obsessively, out of all the essential New York themes. The necessary (but often terrifying) seesawing between change and stasis. The constant drama of taste and class; the connoisseurship of gossip. (One man, preparing to dispense a particularly juicy bit, gives “a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible Madeira.”) The shiny lure of fantasy versus the sharp hook of reality. The giant shell game of phoniness and authenticity. The existential strain of distinction versus assimilation—that yearning to be free (one of Wharton’s keywords) but also to belong to a social tribe (another of her keywords). The agonizing, paradoxical struggle to feel like a special individual in a city of millions.

In her acclaimed biography of Edith Wharton (whose birthday is today), Hermione Lee offered some other clues on why The Age of Innocence may resonate with readers today:

Her survey of the age uses, and describes, surveillance. Like The House of Mirth, this novel is all about being watched. It describes a society of spies and observers, and attempts at secrecy and concealment. It is a drama with spectators (in a society dedicated to inaction and leisure) which starts in an opera house with an audience watching itself more than it is watching the stage, and ends with the figure of a solitary watcher, unable to act. . . In the very small theatre of activities that is 1870s New York, privacy is a figment.

Lee also identifies the appealing “double act” the narrator performs:

Wharton is like one of the watchers in the novel who applies to the affairs of his friends “the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist.” . . . The page is thick with knowing allusions to details of the time, swiftly footnoted so as at once to familiarize us with vanished customs, and to make fun of them . . . The narrating voice is knowingly, even affectionately, close to what it describes (“the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy”) yet has a historian’s remoteness and a taste for (still applicable) ironic generalizations: “Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

So does this resolve the question of which is the greatest New York novel—or is there an argument to be made for another candidate?

Also of interest:

• The Huffington Post recently posted a slide show of its editors’ sixteen candidates for “the greatest New York novel”
• Read how Edith Wharton skewers women’s book clubs in “Xingu,” the current Story of the Week

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels, Novellas, Stories, and Other Writings (4 volumes—plus a free book)

What All Souls’ Day meant for Edith Wharton

All Souls’ Day (November 2) had a special meaning for Edith Wharton. In 1935 she dedicated her memoir, A Backyard Glance, to “the friends who every year on All Souls’ Night come and sit with me by the fire.” Remembering dear ones was an annual custom for Wharton. Writing on All Souls’ night in 1921 she led off her litany of “all my dead” with her childhood nurse, “my darling Doyley,” and included Henry James and Howard Sturgis.

Over the course of her life Wharton moved from having a phobic terror of an “undefinable menace” to becoming one of literature’s most accomplished practitioners of the ghost tale. In her autobiographical fragment “Life and I” she recalls how as a nine-year-old recovering from a bout of typhoid fever she was given a “robber-tale” which proved “perilous reading” and brought on a serious relapse:

When I came to myself, it was to enter a world haunted by formless horrors. I had been naturally a fearless child; now I lived in a state of chronic fear. Fear of what? I cannot say—& even at the time, I was never able to formulate my terror. It was like some dark undefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking, and threatening. . . How long the traces of my illness lasted may be judged by the fact that, till I was twenty-seven or eight, I could not sleep in the room with a book containing a ghost-story, & that I have frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!

By 1909, when she wrote her poem “All Souls,” she had clearly recovered. Two lovers tryst among the graves in the churchyard:

And where should a man bring his sweet to woo
But here, where such hundreds were lovers too?
Where lie the dead lips that thirst to kiss,
The empty hands that their fellows miss,
Where the maid and her lover, from sere to green,
Sleep bed by bed, with the worm between?
For it’s turn of the year and All Souls’ night,
When the dead can hear and the dead have sight.

“All Souls’” was also the title of her very last story, completed in February 1937—just six months before her death. In her preface to Ghosts, the posthumously published collection including the story, she wrote, “Ghosts, to make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity.” Although the narrator claims “this isn’t exactly a ghost story,” “All Souls’,” with its focus on an injured elderly woman alone in a large mansion on All Souls’ night, becomes a masterful study of silence:

Silence – more silence! It seemed to be piling itself up like the snow on the roof and in the gutters. Silence. How many people that she knew had any idea what silence was – and how loud it sounded when you really listened to it?

Seventy-five and in poor health, Wharton poured a litany of anxieties into her last story, as her biographer Hermione Lee illuminates:

The title was a private reference to her long annual habit of sitting alone, remembering her dead . . . But whereas in Wharton’s own life these vigils were consolatory, the story is one of pain, loneliness and terror. Her long-vanished life at The Mount, the loss of her dear old servants, her dread of helplessness in old age, her experience of solitude and illness, her horror of what was happening in the world, and, deepest down, what she never spoke of, her fear of death, are all felt in this last story.

Of related interest:

• Verity’s Virago Venture, Reading All the Time, and Beyond the Brush all spent Halloween week reading the Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
• Washington State University hosts The Edith Wharton Society with links to conferences, online resources, and updated news about Wharton scholarship

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels, Novellas, Stories, and Other Writings (the five volumes include A Backward Glance, the poem "All Souls," the story "All Souls'," and the biographical fragment "Life and I")

Moved by a story, Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time

It’s hard to imagine that the young Edith Wharton was shy. Yet that is her explanation for why she failed to meet Henry James the first two times their paths crossed. She wore her newest Doucet dress, “a tea-rose pink, embroidered with iridescent beads,” to a dinner party in Paris in 1887 when she was just twenty-five. He never noticed her and she didn’t speak up (“those were the principles in which I had been brought up”).

Later, in the 1890s, when they were both part of the entourage of the painter Daniel Curtis and his wife in Venice Wharton donned what she believed to be a particularly fetching hat. Another failed effect.

James did begin hearing about Wharton through their many mutual friends. As she wrote more, their pieces began appearing in the same magazines. In 1899 she sent him her first book of tales, The Greater Inclination. James wrote a caustic note to a friend: he had read “the fruits of her literary toils.” What was best in them was “her amiable self.” What was “not best was quite another person.”

Then in October 1900 Lippincott’s Magazine published “The Line of Least Resistance,” a story set in Newport about an unfaithful wife and a weak-willed rich husband. Readers in Wharton’s high society circle in Lenox, Massachusetts were appalled: they thought the millionaire bore a scandalous resemblance to Emily Vanderbilt’s brother-in-law. James loved it. Reading it prompted him to write this historic first letter from England on October 26, 1900 (110 years ago today):

Dear Mrs. Wharton,

I brave your interdiction & thank you both for your letter & for the brilliant little tale in the Philadelphia repository [Lippincott’s]. The latter has an admirable sharpness & neatness, & infinite wit & point – it only suffers a little, I think, from one’s not having a direct glimpse of the husband’s provoking causes – literally provoking ones. . . The subject is really a big one for the canvas – that was really your difficulty. But the thing is done. And I applaud, I mean I value, I egg you on in, your study of the American life that surrounds you. Let yourself go in it & at it – it’s an untouched field, really: the folk who try, over there, don’t come within miles of any civilized, however superficially, any “evolved” life. And use to the full your ironic and satiric gifts; they form a most valuable (I hold) & beneficent engine. Only, the Lippincott tale is a little hard, a little purely derisive. But that’s because you’re so young, &, with it, so clever. Youth is hard--& your needle-point, later on, will muffle itself in a little blur of silk. It is a needle-point! Do send me what you write, when you can kindly find time, & do, some day, better still, come to see yours, dear Mrs. Wharton, most truly,

Henry James

After many more letters they finally met in December 1903; for the remaining thirteen years of James’s life they would become close friends and traveling companions, despite a nineteen-year age difference.

Of related interest:

• Great Books, Half Read recounts Edith Wharton’s hilarious tale of motoring with Henry James (and why he should never ask for directions)
• The Mount, the Lenox estate Edith Wharton designed, hosts numerous Halloween-themed events this week, including readings of Wharton’s ghost stories

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels, Novellas, Stories, & Other Writings; Henry James: Complete Stories