Edith Wharton: An Overview
Biographies:
Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Print.
Auchincloss's work is significant for the extensive use of black and white photos throughout the text that depict Edith Wharton, her friends and family, her various residences, the title pages and illustrations from some of her works. The author puts a lot of himself in this work, so if the reader likes having another’s input then this book is a great tool for Wharton researchers or fans.
Lewis, R W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Print.
This biography explores her life from her uneasy adolescence, to her friendship with Walter Berry, to her marriage to Teddy Wharton. It covers her consuming love affair and her valued friendships.
Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc, 1947. Print.
This book was published only 10 years after Wharton’s death, needless to say, it was the first to appear on her and it had a great influence on the biographies of her to come. Lubbock was at one time a close friend of Wharton, but they had a falling out over his choice of bride. It can be said that his resentment of her shows, if one is a close reader, through his subtle downgrading depiction of her and her writing.
Turk, Ruth. Edith Wharton: Beyond the Age of Innocence. Greensboro, NC: Tudor Publishers, 1998. Print.
Turk’s biography of Edith Wharton details her life and focuses on her relationships with the people around her. It discusses the hardships she had as a child living with a mother who would not let her read or write. Wharton’s rocky marriage is a primary focus, as well as her friendships that influenced her writing.
Autobiography:
Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. London: Dent, 1993. Print.
In her autobiography she gives a vivid account of both her public and her private life. It describes the sophisticated New York society in which she spent her youth, and chronicles her travels throughout Europe, and her literary success as an adult.
Web Resources:
Campbelle, Donna. "The Edith Wharton Society." Washington State University - Pullman, Washington. Oct. 2002. Web. 12 Apr. 2011. <http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/>.
The Edith Wharton Society homepage is hosted by Gonzaga University. The site focuses primarily on the activities of the Society, which include annual meetings, sessions, and special conferences, in addition to publication of The Edith Wharton Review. It also includes a brief biography of Edith Wharton; a list of her primary works, including access to the full text of works published before 1923; a list of summaries and discussion questions submitted by members of the Society; a list of bibliographies on individual works as well as on selected topics; a guide intended to assist teachers in preparing lectures about Edith Wharton and her works; a listing of links to other recommended Wharton web sites.
"Edith Wharton." Women Writers: A Zine. 14 July 1998. Web. 12 Apr. 2011. <http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/wharton1.htm>.
This website contains a biography of Edith Wharton discussing her ancestors and then Wharton’s life. It also contains critical essays from an array of writers. There is also a list of helpful links from the web that can be used in the research of Wharton.
Literature
Fiction:
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Modern Library, 1948. Print.
Set in Upper Class New York City in the 1870s, this novel Newland Archer is preparing his marriage to sheltered May Welland, when her 30 year old cousin arrives announcing her divorce from her husband. Newland does not want this kind of behavior in his family, so he tries to keep them together, but in the process, falls in love with Ellen.
Wharton, Edith, Candace Waid, and C W. E. Bigsby. The Buccaneers. London: J.M. Dent, 1993. Print.
This story is another one of Wharton’s that revolves around marrying for money and social status rather than love. It was unfinished at the time of Wharton’s death and was later finished by an Edith Wharton scholar, Marion Maniwaring.
Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1913. Print.
This novel is about Mr and Mrs Spragg who are hoping to forge an introduction into society and arrange a suitable match for their only daughter. Undine Spragg, while spoilt, selfish, and vain, is very informed and disenchanted of the necessary social behaviors of the time.
Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. New York: Scribner, 1939. Print.
Ethan Frome lives with his wife who he does not love, in a miserably existence, until her cousin, Mattie, comes to live with them. He finally feels the passionate and enduring love he has waited for, but this does not come without tragedy.
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.
Lily Bart wants nothing more than to live a luxurious life in the high society. Yet she is torn between wealth and a marriage based on mutual respect and love, which ruins any chances she had for a wealthy marriage.
Wharton, Edith. Madame De Treymes, and Others: Four Novelettes. New York: Scribner, 1970. Print.
This novel is one just one of her works depicting Americans living in France. Fanny de Malrive, was a free spirited American, until she came to France and in an unhappy marriage. When she falls in love with her friend John Durham, she wishes to marry him, but she worries her Catholic husband will not approve of divorce. This collection of short stories also includes Wharton’s other works: The Touchstones, Bunner Sisters, and Sanctuary.
Wharton, Edith. The Mother's Recompense. New York: Scribner, 1986. Print.
The story starts off by Showing Kate being exiled back to New York from France, from abandoning her husband and daughter, Anne. Kate is summoned back to her daughter Anne, as she is preparing her marriage to Chris Fenno, who Kate happened to be in love with earlier in her life.
Wharton, Edith. A Son at the Front. [a Novel.]. London, 1923. Print.
John Campton, an American painter, has to cancel his vacation plans with his son George, when George is must report for military service. While his parents fight to use their social status to keep him out of the war, George secretly joins the infantry leaving his father unsure of his role to play in the war and his worry for the country.
Wharton, Edith. Summer. New York: Scribner, 1964. Print.
Charity Royall lives unhappily in a small rural town, in an isolated village with her hard-drinking adoptive father. She meets a visiting architect who shows her love and the hope for escape.
Wharton, Edith. Twilight Sleep. New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1927. Print.
Mrs. Manford lives in New York and will do whatever it takes to escape boredom, pain, and emptiness, through any form of “Twilight Sleep.” This novel revolves around the jazz age of the New York society.
Wharton, Edith. The Reef. New York: Scribner, 1970. Print.
Anna Leath, an American widow living in France, has renewed her relationship with a past love, George Darrow and they hope to marry. On his way to see her, George meets Sophy Viner, who is as vibrant and spontaneous as Anna is reserved and restrained. Sophy is a governess to Anna’s daughter and the three are complicatedly twisted living at Givre.
Wharton, Edith, Yoshie Itabashi, and Mijoko Sasaki. The Valley of Decision. Kyoto: Rinsen Book, 1988. Print.
This romance chronicles the rise to power of Odo Valsecca during the intellectual and political turmoil which preceded the French Revolution. During his childhood and early manhood, Odo interacts with all the major parties—the peasantry, the clergy, the liberal freethinkers, and the nobility—which have a fundamental stake in preserving or destabilizing the archaic power structure based on rigid class distinctions and superstitious religious customs.
Reviews and Literary Criticism:
Nevius, Blake. Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953. Print.
This is an examination of Wharton’s major writings. His work touches on many of the key themes in Wharton's literature, and is often cited by many Wharton scholars. It shows the universality of Wharton’s themes and touches on her as a writer as well as a person.
Howe, Irving. Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Print.
Some of the works in this collection are rather harsh in their treatment of Wharton as a writer, but the collection was developed in the 1960s when many critics thought her work was simply the by product of Henry James and merely echoed his work and themes. However, Howe states in the introduction that "the critical issues posed by her work should again be raised, so that she may take her rightful place as a living figure in the literary world.”
The Arts
Visual Art:
Campbell, D. "Edith Wharton Society: House of Mirth Illustrations." Washington State University - Pullman, Washington. 2005. Web. 05 Apr. 2011. <http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/hmirthillus.html>.
This site contains illustrations from the first edition of Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Each picture contains a line underneath from the text describing what is seen. The illustrations were drawn by A. B. Wenzell.
Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Abrams, 1994. Print.
This is an elaborately illustrated biography that portrays Edith Wharton in many lights. Instead of focusing solely on her writing and family life, it shows how she was an avid gardener, architect, interior designer, and art scholar. The illustrations in the book include photographs, some by Wharton herself, as well as selected drawings, paintings, garden plans, letters, and postcards.
Dwight, Eleanor, and Viola Hopkins Winner. "Edith Wharton." The National Portrait Gallery. Web. 05 Apr. 2011. <http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/wharton/whar3.htm>.
This web resource is titled “Edith Wharton’s World: Portraits of People and Places” and was an exhibit at the Smithsonian. It discusses her writing career and her family life. Throughout the writing there are pictures and paintings interspersed.
Gradisek, Amanda R. Passing Figures: Fashion and the Formation of Modernist Identity in the American Novel. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona, 2009. Internet resource.
This work looks at the relation of fashion and the characters in literary novels. It shows how fashion allows authors to “fragment and remake conceptions of self and persona, meaning and value, and past and present, all categories scholars now argue were at the heart of the aesthetics of modernism.”
Hughes, Clair. Dressed in Fiction. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Internet resource.
This volume traces the disposition of dress in key fictional texts of the 18th & 19th centuries, from Defoe's 'Roxana' to Edith Wharton's 'House of Mirth'. It covers a range of topics from the growth of the middle classes and association of luxury with vice, to reasons why wedding dresses rarely symbolise happiness.Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion. Durham, N.H: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009. Print.
This novel compares Wharton’s novel in the context of the history of fashion. It asserts that dress lies at the very center of her thinking about art and culture. It integrates cultural study into the analysis of her literary works.
Singley, Carol J. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Oxford [England: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.
This is a collection of essays from many different authors discussing Wharton’s influence and thoughts on many of the visual arts of her time. It addresses her views on the fashion, art, architecture, and film. It also draws on the fashion of the women in her novels.
Decorative Arts/Architecture:
Benert, Annette. The Architectural Imagination of Edith Wharton: Gender, Class, and Power in the Progressive Era. Madison [N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. Print.
This book tracks Wharton's literary and architectural work together, revealing their complex relationship. It also focuses on the odd symmetry of her career, which began and ended in extreme attachment to conventional values, moved from pleasure in Italy to anguish for France, and centered on the brilliantly crafted structures and spaces of the prewar novels.
Carpenter, Laura J. Edith Wharton and the Decorative Arts: Avocation and Vocation. , 1987. Print.
Carpenter’s thesis from the University of Notre Dame looks closely at the relation of decorative arts as an influence in Wharton’s works and also the contributions she made. The subjects it includes are aesthetics, contributions in decorative arts, contributions in interior design, home and haunts, decoration of houses, and criticism and interpretation.
Cohn, Melissa O. "doing Over the Drawing Room": The Drawing Room and Women's Changing Social Status in the Novels of Edith Wharton. , 2003. Print.
This work is a Thesis from the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts. It discusses the relations of a woman’s living room and her social status in New York, particularly in Wharton’s novels, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country.
Davis, Kay. "The Mount: Edith Wharton and the American Renaissance." American Studies @ The University of Virginia. 2001. Web. 05 Apr. 2011. <http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/Davis/wharton/home/home.html>.
This website was constructed to show Wharton’s expert design of her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Mount. The Mount is an example of the renaissance in American art and architecture that began in the 1870s and extended into the early 1900s. It discusses the effect her home had on her as her quiet retreat.
Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Print.
Fryer examines the actual and imagined spaces that women perceive, inhabit, and create. She psychological analysis to determine the meaning behind the plans for a house, room, set of furnishings, landscape, and story that Wharton creates.
Wharton, Edith, and Sarah B. Wright. Edith Wharton Abroad: Selected Travel Writings, 1888-1920. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. Print.
This is a compilation of Wharton’s 7 works of travel. It contains her trips to Italy, Africa, and France. She describes art, architecture, sculpture, and landscape with the eye of an educated connoisseur and the compassion of a perceptive and visionary novelist.
Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Norton, 1978. Print.
This book was written by both Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman. In it they denounce Victorian decorating practices, rooms with heavy curtains and overstuffed furniture. Instead it proposes simple, classical design principles, stressing symmetry, proportion, and balance in architecture.
Film
Boswell, Parley A. Edith Wharton on Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Print.
Edith Wharton on Film explores and examines the relationships among Wharton's writings, the popular culture in which she published them, and the subsequent film adaptations of her work. The works in which Wharton mentions film and Hollywood are also studied. There are a total of 7 films that are examined in this resource.
"Edith Wharton - IMDb." The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Web. 05 Apr. 2011. <http://uk.imdb.com/name/nm0923585/>.
This website contains a list and links to all of the films and TV series that were made about Edith Wharton and her novels. It contains 13 films and 9 TV series. It also contains trivia about Wharton and trivia, actors, and release dates of each of the films when they are clicked on.
Edith Wharton & Her Novels. London: BBC Education, 1994.
This resource is great for those studying the life, literature and legacy of Edith Wharton. It is a video recording that includes materials on three of her novels and their film and video adaptations.
Scorsese, Martin, Jay Cocks, and Robin Standefer. The Age of Innocence: A Portrait of the Film Based on the Novel by Edith Wharton. New York: Newmarket Press, 1993. Print.
This resource contains the screenplay of the Age of Innocence and allows for the comparison between literature and cinema. The afterward contains a list of cinema sources influenced the writing and directing of Scorsese and Cocks. It contains 4 sections, the first The first is filled with turn-of-the-century quotes, photos, and full-color renditions of paintings by Whistler and Sargent that evokes the period in which the movie is set. The second contains the complete screenplay with stills from the film as well as photos of the filming process. The third is a list of 22 films that the authors feel influenced them while they made The Age of Innocence. Finally, there is a section of quotes from the cast and crew members.
Sheen, Erica, and Robert Giddings. The Classic Novel from Page to Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Print.
This resource includes works by many authors about novels that were turned into film. The chapter devoted to Edith Wharton goes into the film criticism of Martin Scorcese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. He discusses the themes and actions in the novel and compares it to the film version.
Wright, Sarah B. Edith Wharton a to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 1998. Print.
This is a comprehensive collection of Edith Wharton’s life and work including translations of her novels, reviews from critics, her poetry and short stories. It also includes media adaptations of her work, along with her contribution to film and television. Another chapter is devoted to musical adaptations of her works.
A List of Film Adaptations of Wharton’s Novels:
The House of Mirth (1918)
The Glimpses of the Moon (1923)
The Age of Innocence (1924)
The Marriage Playground (Based on “The Children”) (1929)
The Age of Innocence (1934)
Strange Wives (Based on “Bread upon the Waters”) (1934)
Old Maids (1939)
The Children (1990)
Ethane Frome (1993)
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Passion’s Way (1999)
The House of Mirth (2000)
Bibliographies/Indexes
Brenni, Vito J. Edith Wharton: A Bibliography. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Library, 1966.
While short, this bibliography was the first that intended to list by title all her novels, short stories, poems, essays, and nonfiction works. That is not all, it also contains critical essays, biographies, critical works, book reviews, translations, and drama/film of her works.
Lauer, Kristin O. and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990.
This bibliography is arranged using subject format, making it easier for the researcher’s use. It is written in 15 chapters and includes studies, essay collections, and reviews of Wharton and her work. There are four indexes: author, title, subject, and works.
Garrison, Stephen. Edith Wharton: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.
This bibliography can be used in conjunction with the Lauer and Murray work. It contains a full listing of the first publication of the items written by Wharton. The chapters are on the topics of separate publications, collected editions, first book and pamphlet appearances, first-appearance contributions to magazines and newspapers, and books edited by Wharton. He includes detailed notes about each of her works.
