What do you think?
Rate this book
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)
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)
181 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1962
About the author
Irving Howe
206 books47 followersIrving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 6, 2024
Ye olde collection of literary criticism. I used to pick up this series of criticism in the dollar bins on the sidewalks outside college bookstores. Those yellowing books still hold value beyond their initial use when I would plunder them for ideas before tapping out a term paper the night before it was due.
Without a deadline energizing me, I found it relaxing to read the non-jargon-y takes from the 20th century literary establishment: QD Leavis, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin. I don’t know how many more times I can read Wharton’s work. But I can mull over what her near-contemporaries thought of her as I drift off to sleep.
Louis Auchincloss, who came from the New York world Wharton skewered so perfectly, ended his essay this way: “Mrs. Wharton at her best was an analyst of the paralysis that attends failure in the market place and of the coarseness that attends success. Hers was not a world where romance was apt to flourish.”
That was what always made Wharton’s work seem less than truly great to me and also oddly modern. There is despair at its heart in its compensatory fascination with material life, triumph at identifying the rules of society and how they oppress, and a complete lack of faith in a life that could be otherwise.
Without a deadline energizing me, I found it relaxing to read the non-jargon-y takes from the 20th century literary establishment: QD Leavis, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin. I don’t know how many more times I can read Wharton’s work. But I can mull over what her near-contemporaries thought of her as I drift off to sleep.
Louis Auchincloss, who came from the New York world Wharton skewered so perfectly, ended his essay this way: “Mrs. Wharton at her best was an analyst of the paralysis that attends failure in the market place and of the coarseness that attends success. Hers was not a world where romance was apt to flourish.”
That was what always made Wharton’s work seem less than truly great to me and also oddly modern. There is despair at its heart in its compensatory fascination with material life, triumph at identifying the rules of society and how they oppress, and a complete lack of faith in a life that could be otherwise.
Displaying 1 of 1 review