Edith Wharton in the News

Wharton's 150th from the BBC

2012-01-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9025633/Edith-Wharton-150th-anniversary-BBC-Radio-4-Extra-preview.html
It’s the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth, and the digital network Radio 4 Extra is marking it with vintage adaptations of her work from the BBC’s vast archive.

First up Anna Massey stars in Madame de Treymes (Sunday, 1.30pm), a powerful tale of romance, intrigue and power struggles.

Then at 2.30pm, it’s Female Ghost starring Buffy Davis and John Guerrasio as an American couple in England who find their past catching up with them.

Edith Wharton Review (Fall 2011) Table of Contents

2011-12-28T11:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/ewr.htm

Volume 27.2, Fall 2011

Faulstick, Dustin H. "'He that Loveth Silver Shall Not Be Satisfied with Silver'" Reconsidering the Connection between The House of Mirth and Ecclesiastes."Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 1-12.

Patten, Ann L. "'The Wanamaker Touch in Fiction' and Edith Wharton's Guide to Novel-writing in Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 12-22.

Raphael, Lev. "Writing Wharton's Wrong." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 22-2.

Shaffer-Koros, Carol. "Wharton in New York." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 23-24.

Goldman-Price, Irene. "Edith Wharton Collection Research Report." Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 24-25.

Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. Rev. of Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race by Jennie A. Kassanoff. Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 25-26.

Campbell, Donna. Rev. of The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton, ed. Laura Rattray. Edith Wharton Review 27.2 (Fall 2011): 26-27.

New Independent Production of Summer

2011-11-12T22:14:00.001-08:00

An independent feature adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1917 classic Summer is planned for 2012. In development since 2010, Summer has been adapted for the screen by Carl J.Sprague - carlsprague.com - film designer and verteran of several projects based on Wharton's work - notably The Age of Innocence (1990) and The Buccaneers (1995). Principal locations have been identified in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where Wharton made her home and took inspiration for the overlooked masterpiece she called "the hot Ethan Frome". Further information is avaiable at Summerthemovie.com and on the Facebook page Summer. Wharton enthusiasts are encouraged to visit - opinions, suggestions and support are most welcome.

The Edith Wharton Restoration at The Mount has generously hosted readings of the screenplay, and another very successful reading took place in April 2011 at the Players Club in New York. Financing is still in progress, but over $100,000 has been raised toward an approximately million dollar budget. Casting sessions are scheduled for January. Principal photography will begin in March 2012 and continue into the early summer. A summer 2013 release is anticipated.

Edith Wharton's Childhood Home

2011-10-29T16:41:00.000-07:00

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/37dd500a-fbdf-11e0-989c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1cDWrN4Tp

In the shadow of New York’s Flatiron Building, sandwiched between a burrito shop and a deli, sits the five-storey building where a young Edith Wharton spent much of her childhood reading in her father’s library.

The American author, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, was born and spent her childhood years at 14 West 23rd Street. However, the droves of people who walked by on their way to Madison Square Park every day had no idea. Nor did local historians or even the owners of the building until a walking tour leader recently discovered the fact.

Now, thanks to preservationist Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, a red plaque next to the modern glass entrance alerts passersby and visitors that the building housed, among other rooms, an extensive library that inspired Wharton’s initial curiosity about books during an era when a woman’s name was only to appear in print three times in her life – at birth, marriage and death.

Diamonstein-Spielvogel has devoted the past 15 years to commemorating more than 100 locations throughout New York’s five boroughs – the childhood homes, studios and workspaces of famous residents – through the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center’s cultural medallion programme. The programme was the latest in her four-decade-long commitment to preserving the city’s history.

Edith Wharton and Leonardo da Vinci

2011-10-22T13:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/oct/21/leonardo-da-vinci-painter-milan?newsfeed=true

Edith Wharton first saw Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper during a trip to Milan when she was 17. It was to be almost four decades before she finally gave vent to the passion it had aroused. During that long interval, she said, she had "wanted to bash that picture's face". It wasn't the most edifying contribution to art history and she was careful not to broadcast it. Rather, she confessed her loathing privately in a letter to the art historian Bernard Berenson, who, as "the most authorised fist in the world", had just done her pugilistic business for her.

Berenson had published The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (Third Series, 1916) in which he revealed that, as a boy, he had "felt a repulsion" for The Last Supper. "The faces were uncanny, their expressions forced, their agitation alarmed me," he recalled feverishly. "They were the faces of people whose existence made the world less pleasant and certainly less safe." This description of the most famous narrative painting in the world as resembling a Neapolitan marketplace drew great opprobrium. One American newspaper compared it to an act of war, claiming Berenson had "torpedoed" Leonardo's reputation (this at a time when German U-boats were sinking allied ships). Another review argued that he had shown "such want of sympathy with Leonardo's work as is generally considered to place a critic's estimate out of court".

Ben Stiller Teaming with ‘Reality Bites’ Writer for Edith Wharton-Inspired Horror ‘The Mountain’

2011-10-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

http://www.slashfilm.com/ben-stiller-direct-the-mountain/
Ben Stiller is set to reunite with Reality Bites writer Helen Childress for a new picture that couldn’t be more different from their last collaboration. The new project, titled The Mountain, will be a period horror story based on characters from Edith Wharton‘s novel Summer. The movie marks a sharp change of pace for Stiller, whose past projects have been mostly comedies. In addition, it represents a return to writing for Childress, whose Reality Bites was her first and last feature screenplay. More details after the jump.

Wharton Birthplace To Get Commemorative Plaque

2011-10-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

http://hdc.org/blog/2011/09/28/birthplace-of-american-author-to-get-commemorative-plaque/

14 West 23rd Street

Join HDC and the Historic Landmarks Preservation Center for a ceremony commemorating the life and work of Edith Wharton, author of “The House of Mirth” and “The Age of Innocence”. Born in 1862 at 14 West 23rd Street in the Ladies’ Mile Historic District, Wharton was a chronicler of New York City’s Gilded Age and trendsetter for her generation.

The Plaque is part of the Historic Landmarks Preservation Centerhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif’s Cultural Medallion program. The Center, chaired by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel (HDC’s 2011 Landmarks Lion), has installed almost 100 medallions around New York City to heighten public awareness of New York’s cultural and social history.

Mindy Kaling on The House of Mirth

2011-10-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2011/10/11/mindy-kaling-ew-book-quiz/
What’s a favorite book that you’ve read for school?
I would say probably House of Mirth. I read that in 9th grade, and that book completely changed my life. I love Edith Wharton, and my teacher Ms. Fox had us read it, and I just never read a book like that before, like a book that’s from the early 1900’s but felt so modern in terms of what the main character was going through.

That’s such a great book. I feel like it preceded so many modern-day books, movies, and TV shows.
Isn’t that book freaking amazing? I love that book. It’s so current. I think that’s what makes it so timeless. Listen, I freaking love Jane Austen, love Charlotte Brontë, I love stories about frivolous families, and you know, sisterly rivalries — I love that. But House of Mirth so describes the feeling of being trapped in a time of not wanting to get married but sort of having to, and having one chance out of it and the tragic side of that. Because in the Jane Austen books, they usually end up getting married, right in the nick of time, and in House of Mirth, it’s what happens when you don’t. And she didn’t even want to! She would have been okay not doing it. Anyway, I just love that book. It’s just so good.

Ethan Frome and "Pauline Drayton"

2011-07-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

From the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers post on the gift book:

Edith Wharton's love‑triangle in ETHAN FROME is dimly fore‑shadowed by a love‑triangle in `Pauline Drayton,' a story in THE IRIS for 1852.

Lev Raphael in the Huffington Post

2011-07-25T15:28:00.001-07:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lev-raphael/wrangling-with-copyeditor_b_904237.html
Years ago a novelist friend told me that the only thing worse than not being published was being published. I liked the phrase so much I later made it the epigram of my second mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders. But at the time, I had no idea what he could mean. Once you got published, what could you have to worry about? Wouldn't life be perfect?

That was before I had my first wrangle with a copyeditor.

Wharton site available again; Wharton in Florence 2012 new conference site

2011-05-30T16:22:00.001-07:00

The Edith Wharton site is now available at its usual spot: http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org. Also, the conference site for Edith Wharton in Florence 2012 is available here: http://wharton2012.wordpress.com.

Edith Wharton Society web site is down temporarily

2011-05-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

Because of an outage at the main WSU web site, the Edith Wharton Society web site is down temporarily. The IT people say that it will be restored by the end of the week (5/27). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Donna Campbell

Edith Wharton Collection Award and Essay Prize

2011-03-02T08:45:00.000-08:00

The Edith Wharton Essay Prize

Call for Submissions

Deadline: April 30, 2011

Instituted in the fall of 2005, the Edith Wharton Essay Prize is awarded annually for the best unpublished essay on Edith Wharton by a beginning scholar. Graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty members who have not held a tenure-track or full-time appointment for more than four years are eligible to submit their work. The winning essay will be published in The Edith Wharton Review, a peer-reviewed journal indexed in the MLA Bibliography , and the writer will receive an award of $250.

All entries will be considered for publication in The Edith Wharton Review as well as for the Edith Wharton Essay Prize. Submissions should be 15-25 pages in length and should follow the 6th edition MLA style, using endnotes, not footnotes. Applicants should not identify themselves on the manuscript but should provide a separate cover page that includes their names, academic status, e-mail address, postal addresses, and the notation “The Edith Wharton Essay Prize.”

To submit an essay for the prize, send three copies to The Edith Wharton Review:
http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/essayprize.htm

Edith Wharton Collection Research Award

Deadline: March 21, 2011

Each year the Edith Wharton Society offers an Edith Wharton Collection Research Award of $1500 to enable a scholar to conduct research on the Edith Wharton Collection of materials at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Prospective fellows for the 2011-2012 award are asked to submit a research proposal (maximum length 5 single-spaced pages) and a resume by March 21, 2011 to

Gary Totten, Gary.Totten@ndsu.edu
English, Dept. #2320
P.O. Box 6050
North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND 58108-6050

The research proposal should detail the overall research project, its particular contribution to Wharton scholarship, the preparation the candidate brings to the project, and the specific relevance that materials at the Beinecke collection have for its completion. The funds need to be used for transportation, lodging, and other expenses related to a stay at the library.
Notification of the award will take place by April 15th and the award can be used from May 1, 2011 till May 1, 2012. A final report will be due June 1, 2012. The Winner will be asked at that point to submit a short report essay to the Edith Wharton Review, which will briefly inform the readers of the EWR of the research done but will not be in the way of the winner publishing a scholarly article elsewhere as well.
www.edithwhartonsociety.org/researchaward.htm.

Edith Wharton Conference 2012

2011-02-19T12:52:00.001-08:00

Edith Wharton in Florence:

A Sesquicentennial Conference Sponsored by

the Edith Wharton Society

6-8 June 2012

Please join us for the international conference of the Edith Wharton Society in Florence, Italy, celebrating the sesquicentennial of Wharton's birth. “Edith Wharton in Florence” will be the third Wharton Society conference held in Europe and the first in Italy. The conference directors seek papers focusing on all aspects of Wharton's work, and we especially welcome submissions dealing with the international contexts of her writing. Papers might offer readings of any of Wharton's texts, including the short fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and travel writing, in addition to the novels; Wharton's work in relation to any of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts; Wharton in a transatlantic literary context; Wharton and her contemporaries, both male and female, canonical and non-canonical, European and American; Wharton in Italy, Morocco, and elsewhere in Europe; Wharton and the other arts, including painting, photography, theatre, and film (adaptations of her work during her lifetime and those that have appeared more recently); Wharton and cosmopolitanism, globalization, and the various forces of modernity; Wharton and art history. All theoretical approaches welcome, including feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, marxist, queer, and ecocritical, among others.

Through the generosity of Marist College, the conference will be held at Marist's Lorenzo di Medici campus, in the heart of Florence. In addition to panels, there will be a keynote speaker and opportunities for tours of the area.

Please submit 250-500-word abstracts and brief CV to EdithWhartoninFlorence2012@gmail.com

by 15 July 2011.

All conference participants must be members of the Edith Wharton Society

at the time of registration.

For more information about the conference, contact Conference Directors

Meredith Goldsmith (Ursinus College; mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) and

Emily Orlando (Fairfield University; eorlando@fairfield.edu).

Edith Wharton - the American novelist who joined France's WWI effort

2011-01-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

From http://www.english.rfi.fr/visiting-france/20110120-edith-wharton-paris:
Edith Wharton - the American novelist who joined France's WWI effort

By Molly Guinness

The streets just east of the historic Les Invalides military hospital in Paris’s seventh arrondissement have an air of distinguished calm. But when France went to war in 1914, one resident of the rue de Varenne was not prepared to watch from her drawing room.

American novelist Edith Wharton set up workshops for women all over Paris, making clothes for hospitals as well as lingerie for a fashionable clientele. She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for refugees and tuberculosis sufferers and ran a rescue committee for the children of Flanders, whose towns were bombarded by the Germans.

Her friend and fellow author Henry James called her the "great generalissima".

One of the few foreigners allowed to visit the front lines, she described herself rather as “an eager, grotesque figure bestriding a mule in the long tight skirts of 1915, a prosaic Walkyrie laden with cigarettes”.

As long as enriching life is more than preserving it, as long as culture is superior to business efficiency, as long as poetry and imagination and reverence are higher and more precious elements of civilisation than telephones or plumbing, as long as truth is more bracing than hypocrisy, and wit more wholesome than dulness, so long will France remain greater than any nation that has not her ideals.

French ways and their meaning, Edith Wharton
In 1916 she won France’s highest decoration - the Légion d'honneur. She was also the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

The plaque outside her house at 53, rue de Varenne says Edith Wharton was the first American writer to come to live in France for love of this country and of its literature.

"When I think of Paris, I think of heaven,” says Margaret Murray, who is president of the Edith Wharton society. “That’s what Paris was for her.”

Wharton came to Paris in 1907 and discovered a world where she could be an intellectual woman and where she could have an affair.

“When I used to go and wander up and down the rue de Varenne and spend time familiarising myself with that area that Wharton lived in, I used to feel that it was extraordinarily different from the rest of Paris,” says Wharton’s biographer Hermione Lee. “My feeling is now, as then, that it was a very special and rather rarefied and rather closed-in part of Paris.”

The area has retained the quiet grandeur it had at the beginning of the 20th century when Wharton was entertaining major cultural figures like André Gide, Walter Berry and Henry James.

In 1914, though, she opened up several apartments in the area, transforming them into workshops for women.

“When war broke out an immense number of benevolent women in Paris felt a violent but vague impulse to ‘help’,” Wharton wrote in the New York Times. “This impulse found its chief expression in the traditional pursuits of making lint, hemming towels and crocheting baby jackets.
"Such activities are harmless and even commendable in days of peace, but in war time any unpaid industry encroaches on the rights of the unemployed, and this fact was so promptly understood in France that I can claim only by a few weeks’ priority the honor of having founded the first paying workroom in Paris.”

Soon her workshop in the rue de l’Université was overflowing and she was obliged to open up others around the arrondissement.

When refugees began pouring into Paris in September 1914 – “they all came at once in a terrible tidal wave” – Wharton took up their cause. She rallied friends to provide three large houses, she wrote endless letters to America and her friends in France asking for money and managed the accounts with impressive business acumen.

“The worst of doing good is that it makes one forget how to do anything more interesting,” she remarked.

Her literary output suffered as a result of all this good – “I had a really big novel in me a year ago (excuse the gynaecological metaphor), but things have killed it.”

Wharton took a hard line when it came to incompetence or silliness.

Her route to the frontline was impeded because some women had behaved so riotously that French authorities were clamping down on frontline tourism. Wharton was bringing supplies to the soldiers.

“I don’t know anything that horrifies me more than the mixture of flirtation and surgery, of opoponax [a scent] and chloroform,” she said.

Wharton's writing was almost alone in America in its bleak portrayal of the war; she was ashamed of America’s isolationist policies during the first years, and one of her best friends, Walter Berry, is credited with being instrumental in bringing America into the war.
[read the rest at the link above]

Mount Seeks Help

2011-01-09T10:35:00.000-08:00

From the Berkshire Eagle:
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ci_17040011

Mount seeks help
By Clarence Fanto, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Updated: 01/08/2011 08:15:45 AM EST

Saturday January 8, 2011

LENOX -- The Mount, home of the Edith Wharton Restoration and one of the county's iconic historic-house museums, is facing potential financial peril again: It's actively seeking a new lender to assume total debts of $5.2 million and pursuing a financially strong partner to share the spacious property off Route 7 & 20 and form a strategic alliance.

In response to ongoing operating losses, a slowdown in contributions, and a formidable $1 million "balloon" repayment to two principal creditors due at the end of May, the staff was cut by one-third, from nine to six, in November.

"We've talked to a number of cultural organizations but we haven't found the right fit yet," Executive Director Susan Wissler told The Eagle this week. "It would be at least part of the solution."

A Voice from Old New York by Louis Auchincloss

2010-12-18T12:08:00.001-08:00

A VOICE FROM OLD NEW YORK

BY LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT, $25

Readers lost a thoughtful, wise author when Louis Auchincloss died in January this year at the age of 92.

Auchincloss left a final, posthumous gift, however, a memoir of his youth titled “A Voice From Old New York.”

The novelist and biographer had written an earlier autobiography in 1974, “A Writer's Capital.” He could have written his last book about the decades that followed, but he chose to revisit his childhood.

Auchincloss is known for writing about the manners and society of New York City's wealthy. He took over where Edith Wharton left off. He had a knack for it because he was born into that world.

Growing up in New York City's Upper East Side, he had maids, nurses, additional homes on Long Island and Bar Harbor, Maine, and prestigious private schools, including Groton and Yale University.

In his numerous novels and biographies, he was able to distance himself from that milieu to write critically about the people that surrounded him, their failings as well as their humanities.

In “A Voice,” he focuses on his family, his parents and siblings, and on his friends. He drops quite a few famous names along the way. He was a cousin, for example, to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Obituary of Eleanor Dwight, Wharton scholar and biographer

2010-12-05T21:29:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times: DWIGHT--Eleanor Collier, 72, died on November 16. Born September 5, 1938, in Boston, she attended St. Timothy's and Shipley schools and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1960. She earned a master's degree from Columbia University in 1964 and a Ph.D. in American literature from New York University in 1984. She lived all her adult life in New York City. An Edith Wharton scholar, she wrote an illustrated biography of Edith Wharton, published in 1994. Her other books portrayed Diana Vreeland, the Gilded Age in New York City, and tennis innovator James Van Alen. Her articles on gardens, travel, and literature appeared in Harper's Bazaar, House Beautiful, and New York magazines, and the New York Times. She taught and lectured extensively on literature and gardens. She gardened with her husband at their summer home on Mount Desert Island, Maine. A formidable intellect, she served on the boards of Edith Wharton's estate "The Mount," the Colony Club, and the Garden Club of Mount Desert, and was a member of the Century Association. (read the rest at the New York Times site).

A Guestbook for remembrances is available here:

http://www.legacy.com/guestbook/nytimes/guestbook.aspx?n=eleanor-dwight&pid=146774992&page=2

Wharton's poem "Elves' Library" and hauntings at The Mount

2010-10-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

From http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/207208/A-small-slice-of-Royal-s-high-life

The walnut-panelled library contains more than 200 works of original literature, requested by librarian Princess Marie Louise. “To the writers and musicians she sent tiny blank volumes for them to fill,” says Lucinda. In return she received a hand-written, leather-bound story from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, How Watson Learned The Trick, Rudyard Kipling submitted a 4x3cm book of handwritten poems, some unpublished, complete with his own illustrations, MR James wrote The Haunted Dolls’ House, Thomas Hardy sent seven poems and Robert Graves five.

Edith Wharton considered her contribution to be “doggerel… unworthy of so charming a destination”. Amusingly, Lucinda agrees: “She was right. Her poem Elves’ Library is appalling,” says Lucinda.

From Halloween brings haunted tours at Edith Wharton’s The Mount:
Now, in honor of the looming presence of Halloween, The Mount is offering some special spooky programming in addition to the 90-minute Friday Night Fright tours that begin at 6 and 7 p.m. On Saturday, Oct. 30, at 11 p.m. Schuyler and her colleague, librarian Molly McFall, will lead a late-night tour complete with re-enactments and the usual spectral guests. A ghost tour and reading will be held earlier, at 6:30 p.m.

"The people who come here are all over the place," McFall said. "We’ve got young teenagers who want to be scared, professional ghost hunters and women on a girls night out. They’re as old as we allow them, basically from 8 years old to 80."

No matter the age of the visitor, the tour, according to both women, is not for the faint of heart. Many visitors who come in search of a ghostly encounter are not disappointed.

"We go upstairs in the stables, and it’s dark and creepy, and the space is huge," McFall said. "That’s when the kids get scared. There are some possibly true gruesome stories which took place in the stables."

One such story is that of a servant girl who was reported to have hanged herself on the property.

"That story is attached to The Mount from way back," McFall said. "Rumor had it that the girl hanged herself in the attic. We assumed that it was the attic in the main house. But then we had a psychic figure here in 2008 from Ghost Hunters International and he said he saw a figure hanging from a beam in the stable."

In addition to seeing the figure, the young psychic also was able to "read" the emotions of certain rooms in the house, particularly rooms in which the domestic turmoil of Wharton’s life played out for years.

"Once the psychic entered Teddy Wharton’s room, he felt very sorry and depressed," McFall said. "He said he felt something awful, something oppressive."

Schuyler is not quick to blame the odd happenings on the ghosts and bad energy that encompassed the Wharton legacy at The Mount. In fact, she said, of all of the inhabitants of the mansion, the Whartons were there the least amount of time.

"The Shattucks (who purchased the property in 1911) both died in the house. Mr. Shattuck had a heart attack and died peacefully," she said. "This is not something you talk about normally on a standard tour. In the room where he died, certain people have had experiences where they can’t breathe."

While she hasn’t had this experience, Pixley said there have been many incidents at the estate that make her catch her breath at the creepiness of it all.

"I’ve heard someone call my name when I was the only one in the house. I’ve heard a man sneeze," she said. "I was on the second floor in the dining room when I heard an angry man’s voice tell me to get out. It put my heart in my throat and sent chills down my spine."

Even Pixley’s co-worker Sherry has been harassed by unseen beings.

"The other night we were on the third floor and I was walking down the main stairs when I heard Sherry scream," she said. "She said that someone had flicked her really hard on the head, so hard that her barrette had been knocked out of her hair."

Digested Classics: The Age of Innocence

2010-10-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

Humor from John Crace in The Guardian:

The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton (1920)

When Newland Archer arrived, the curtain had just gone up. "Darn it," he thought. "I am 10 seconds early." At least New York society had not witnessed his faux-pas.

He gazed towards the divine May Welland, seated in the Mingott box, and frowned when he saw her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, sitting next to her. What would New York think of the reintroduction of the scarlet woman into society? He and May looked into one another's eyes and Newland knew she had understood he wished their betrothal to be announced that very night.

The engagement would normally have been the talk of New York, yet it was the return of Mrs Mingott's other granddaughter, the Countess Ellen, that dominated salon conversation.

"I hear she left her husband," said Mr Sillerton Jackson. "How scandalous these Europeans are!"

"How dare you, sir!" Newland exclaimed. "She left her husband to escape his beatings."

"A New York wife would take a beating in private," replied Mr Sillerton Jackson. "I find myself compromised by our acquaintance as you are to be married to a Mingott."

These sentiments echoed throughout New York until Mrs Archer persuaded her cousins, the Van der Luydens, New York's most powerful family, to invite the Countess to tea.

"Thank goodness for that," New York society sighed.

Newland was irritated to be summoned to see his employer, Mr Letterblair. Newland had more pressing things to occupy his mind than work; how was New York wearing its waistcoats this season? "Mrs Mingott has requested your assistance," said Mr Letterblair. "The Countess Olenska is seeking a divorce."

Archer understood the delicacy of the situation. "New York will expel the Mingotts from society if you pursue this" he said, "and my engagement to May will also make me an outcast."

A maelstrom of emotion coursed through the Countess's bosom. "Very well," she said. "Come and see me for 10 minutes in a few months' time when I am staying in Skuytercliff," she whispered, overwhelmed by feelings that could not be expressed in New York society.

Newland urged his horses on. "Sorry I'm a bit late," he said, though both he and Ellen knew that what he was really saying was he loved her deeply, yet did not want to compromise her by making her his mistress.

"I've got to go," Ellen replied, though both she and Newland knew what she was really saying was that she loved him deeply, yet did not want to compromise him by becoming his mistress.

Newland went to visit May. "We must get married this year," he begged. "I am aware you once had feelings for a Mrs Rushworth," May replied. "If you have any outstanding obligations to her, then I release you." Newland felt a surge of love for May. Particularly as she didn't seem to have guessed his feelings for the Countess.

"Why do we have to honeymoon in Europe?" May inquired. "Because it is our Henry James moment," Newland replied.

Locked in the loveless marriage decreed by New York, Newland was tormented by his passion for Ellen. He hurried to Boston. "It's been two years and I wanted us to spend another five minutes together," he cried. They kissed, a kiss that signalled they might have intercourse some time in the next few years.

"I'm pregnant," said May, having secretly been aware of her husband's feelings for Ellen all along.

"I am returning to Europe," Ellen announced, and all New York breathed a sigh of relief at such a satisfactory conclusion.

Twenty-six years later, Newland stood outside Ellen's Paris apartment with his son, Dallas. May had died some years earlier and Dallas had suggested they visited.

"Come on up," said Dallas.

"No," said Newland.

Beatrice Palmato

2010-10-09T14:33:00.000-07:00

From The Atlantic:
There's no sex in Edith Wharton's best known work. Her Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence chronicles a decades-long affair between a man and his wife's cousin—where the two lovers don't so much as kiss. In Ethan Frome, a married man and his would-be mistress decide to kill themselves rather than succumb to the temptation to sleep with each other. Her short story "Roman Fever" uses an illegitimate child as a plot device—but does not describe any of the out-of-wedlock sexual activity that went into producing it.

Literary types get excited, then, when they discover Wharton's more explicitly erotic work. Jezebel's Anna North has unearthed a "prose fragment" from a story called "Beatrice Palmato" that Lapham's Quarterly published last winter. North introduces the two-page story with the promise, "Check out the Wharton you didn't read in English class."

[Note: The article doesn't mention it, but this discovery was first published in R. W. B. Lewis's Edith Wharton: A Biography in 1975.]

Glimpses of the Moon musical

2010-09-16T19:04:00.001-07:00

Glimpses of the Moon Based on the Edith Wharton novel Book and lyrics by Tajlei Levis; Music by John Mercurio; Directed by David Marqez; Music directed by Darius Smith; at MetroStage through Oct. 17 There's considerable fizz in this Wharton-meets-Astaire/Rogers musical.
By Bob Mondello on September 17, 2010
No Champagne, No Gain: For the most part, this Jazz Age musical has great fizz.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/39764/glimpses-of-the-moon-theres-considerable-fizz-in-this-wharton/

Glimpses of the Moon, a new Jazz Age musical based on the novel penned by Edith Wharton right after she won a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, may be less than the sum of its parts at MetroStage in Alexandria. But oh, those shimmering parts: sparkling rhinestone-in-the-rough Natascia Diaz as a penniless, sweetly amoral flapper who can kick up her heels at anatomically unlikely angles but has never learned to waltz; Sam Ludwig as the equally penniless, slightly-less-amoral anthropologist who teams up with her in a pawn-the-wedding-presents scam that can only go awry should they inadvertently fall in love; Lauren “Coco” Cohn, who giddily channels Ruth Buzzi (ask your parents) as a pop-eyed, anthropologist-smitten (“speak to me, in Greek to me”) heiress in desperate need of a makeover; Gia Mora as a slinky, silk-swathed slattern who’s just the gal to give her that makeover; Matthew A. Anderson tapping up a storm as an impoverished earl-in-waiting who is three cousins removed from his title; and Stephen F. Schmidt as a clueless rich guy who’s never more appealing than when he’s hiding his anguish from an ex-wife who doesn’t give a damn.

Edith Wharton and War

2010-09-16T19:02:00.001-07:00

From the New Republic:
Books and Arts
Edith Wharton’s War
Was the novelist hopelessly enamored with battle?

*
Elizabeth D. Samet

*
Edith Wharton’s War
What Are Soldiers Looking for When They Return Home? Three Men’s Journeys.
For Memorial Day: Captain Whitten Was My Student

Edith Wharton is not a writer most of us probably associate with war. With the frosty, treacherous, yet bloodless drawing-room battles of Gilded Age New York, yes. With the stink and smoking gore of a trench on the Western Front, no.

And yet there Wharton was in France, for the duration of World War I: working vigorously on behalf of numerous charities and relief organizations, sending dispatches from the front back to American readers, publicly and privately making the case for the United States to join the fight. In 1917, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her efforts.

Having lived in Paris for long stretches since 1907, Wharton had made France her home by the time war broke out in 1914. In addition to divesting herself of her increasingly bizarre husband Teddy, Wharton left behind The Mount, their Palladian-style country house in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. Recently I participated in a literary festival there as a member of the panel “Channeling Edith Wharton: Writers in Wartime.” Although I grew up in Massachusetts, I had never before visited The Mount, much less channeled its original owner, who several times toured the Western Front in her Mercedes. She described her second excursion there to her friend Henry James with a jauntiness I mistrusted: “It was less high in colour than the first adventure, & resulted in several disappointments, as well as in some interesting moments—indeed, once within the military zone every moment is interesting.”

War—as both a general idea and also a feature of our own historical moment—seemed very far from this secluded estate in Lenox, with its elegant house and meticulous garden, its annual “coaching weekend” of horse-drawn carriages. The property’s airy beauty had the effect of intensifying a disjunction to which I cannot grow accustomed: the one between the physical settings of my own life—Central Park, the New York Public Library, the Hudson River, even West Point (martial in tone yet, as a place of learning, somehow rather peaceful)—and the imagined landscapes I carry within, volatile landscapes of a geographically distant war described to me by people fighting it.

One day my mind’s eye might be imprinted with the inhospitable “surface of some alien planet” conjured by a pilot looking for a good place to land his helicopter in the mountains of Afghanistan. The next it might be the “mud cave” depicted by a captain who lives in it with a small group of soldiers surrounded by the stench of the fires in which they must burn their own waste. During my visit to The Mount, the scene I was trying—am still trying—to piece together had only just taken place in Kandahar City, where Chris Goeke, a lieutenant I knew well, was killed when his unit was hit with small-arms, rifle, and rocket-propelled-grenade fire.

The disconnection between my external and internal worlds can occasionally prove dizzying. I wouldn’t call what I feel at such moments guilt exactly, or regret, for it isn’t that I think I should be doing something else or that I wish myself (to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Henry V) anywhere but where I am. Nor is it the case that I feel unsuited to the particular role I inhabit, as I surely would were I to find myself on a battlefield rather than in a classroom. Nevertheless, living so far behind the lines presented to my imagination requires a psychological adjustment. And I haven’t adjusted yet.

Meandering through Wharton’s house into Teddy’s sun-splashed den, across the terrace, and upstairs to the “Henry James suite,” I eventually found, as if in response to my discomfort, an exhibit on “Edith Wharton and the First World War,” which begins unprepossessingly in what was the guest bathroom. There I studied a series of placards and photos telling the story of Edith Wharton’s war.

Wharton was disgusted by American neutrality, contemptuous of Woodrow Wilson and his pacifist “apologists,” persuaded that the war was, in the words of her recent biographer, Hermione Lee, “somehow an inevitability, a product of a decaying civilization.” Wharton evidently shared a disturbing faith in war as a kind of purgative with her friend and contemporary Theodore Roosevelt even if her propagandizing zeal never reaches quite the fever pitch of Roosevelt’s own writing on the subject. Her French poilu is an uncomplicated patriot: “Wherever I go among these men of the front,” she wrote in 1915, “I have the same impression … that the absorbing undivided thought of the Defense of France lives in the heart and brain of each soldier as intensely as in the heart and brain of their chief.”

Edith Wharton bio for young adults

2010-08-16T19:50:00.000-07:00

Children’s Books
Age of Innocence
By KATIE ROIPHE
Published: August 13, 2010

Any dreamy or bookish girl who once loved “Harriet the Spy” should immediately take up this lively new biography of Edith Wharton by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge. “The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton” tells the story of a strong-willed, unconventional and smart girl who escaped the stifling life of upper-crust New York around 1880. It includes lush photographs of that faraway time and a pencil drawing Wharton did of herself at 14 reading a book.

Edith Wharton, circa 1905.

THE BRAVE ESCAPE OF EDITH WHARTON

A Biography

By Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

Illustrated. 184 pp. Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $20. (Ages 12 and up)
Related

*
Times Topics: Edith Wharton | Children's Books

When she was 6 her parents set up house in Paris, on the right bank of the Seine. One day they found her sitting under a table in the drawing room with a book. She said she was reading, and when, disbelieving (no one had taught her) they asked her to read aloud, they were shocked to see that she could do so perfectly. The book she had selected from the shelves of the drawing room was a play about a prostitute.

Wharton was given to making up stories from the beginning. She clearly wasn’t a normal girl, and her mother, Lucretia, was alarmed by her odd, unfeminine preoccupations. Lucretia didn’t want to encourage her precocious daughter by giving her paper to write on, so Wharton would take the plain brown paper off parcels that came to the house, spread the giant sheets out on the floor and write on them in long columns. She wrote her first novel this way, at 11. It began: “ ‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?’ said Mrs. Tompkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing room.’ ”

Wharton embarked on her second novel at 14, in secret, and called it “Fast and Loose.” As soon as she completed it she fired off several reviews by fictional critics: “A twaddling romance”; “Every character is a failure, the plot a vacuum, the style spiritless, the dialogue vague, the sentiments weak and the whole thing a fiasco.” This fierce playfulness, the spirited taking on of the universe, infuses both Edith Wharton’s fiction and her life.

Frances McDormand reading Edith Wharton

2010-04-29T08:20:00.001-07:00

Hi,

I'm writing from a New York theater company called Elevator Repair Service. We're having a reading/benefit on Monday May 3rd that we think would appeal to members of The Edith Wharton Society.

The benefit features readings of "loved, banned, and mythologized" American fiction curated by Paul Muldoon (Pulitzer Prize winning poet) and read by Frances McDormand, Lili Taylor, Frankie Faison, Fred Armisen, and ERS company members. The readings include extracts from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, read by Frances McDormand.

We will offer a discount code to your members on ovationtix, which is “LIT” getting them $30 balcony seats to the show (normally $50). I pasted a blurb below about the event. Let me know if you are interested.

Regards,

Lindsay Hockaday
Benefit Coordinator
Elevator Repair Service
www.elevator.org
benefit@elevator.org
718-783-1905

BLURB:

American Fiction: Loved, Banned, and Mythologized
A performance to benefit Elevator Repair Service theater company - May 3rd

Elevator Repair Service invites you to an evening of loved, banned, and mythologized American fiction, curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon. Hosted by Oskar Eustis (Artistic Director of The Public Theater).

Frances McDormand (Burn after Reading, Fargo), Lili Taylor ("Six Feet Under"), Fred Armisen ("Saturday Night Live"), Frankie Faison ("The Wire"), and ERS company members Vin Knight and Susie Sokol will perform passages from great American literature, accompanied by a live comic and ambient sound score.

ERS is currently finishing the third play in a trilogy of critically acclaimed plays based on great American novels by William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.

Benefit Readings likely to be:

Lili Taylor - O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

Fred Armisen - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Frances McDormand - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Frankie Faison - Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

ERS' Vin Knight & Susie Sokol - The Angel of the Odd by Edgar Allan Poe

When:

Monday, May 3
Cocktail reception (limited admission) 6:30 PM
Performance 8:00 PM

Price:

$30 for performance (balcony seating) (chose $50 seats and use code "LIT" to get $20 off)
$50 for performance (right and left orchestra and mezzanine seating)

$125 for reception and performance (orchestra seating)

Location:
New York Society for Ethical Culture
2 West 64th St at Central Park West

To buy tickets, or for more information, visit www.elevator.org, call 718-783-1905, or email benefit@elevator.org

Edith Wharton to be inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame

2010-03-02T06:47:00.003-08:00

New York State Writers Hall of Fame Established

On Friday, April 9th, 2010 the New York Library Association will induct twelve authors into the newly created New York State Writers Hall of Fame. The inaugural group will include ten writers who are deceased and two living whose writings have made a lasting contribution to literature. The list includes the following

James Baldwin
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Caro
Frederick Douglass
Mary Gordon
Langston Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Isaac B. Singer
Edith Wharton
E.B White
Walt Whitman

Robert Caro & Mary Gordon are scheduled to attend the event to receive the honor in person. Robert Caro is the noted biographer of Robert Moses & Lyndon Johnson. He is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes in Biography and the National Book Award. Novelist & memoirist Mary Gordon is currently the New York State Author. Her work includes four bestselling novels: Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, and The Other Side. She has also published a book of novellas, The Rest of Life; a collection of stories, Temporary Shelter; and a book of essays, Good Boys and Dead Girls. She is the recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her most recent book is Reading Jesus (Random House, 2009).

The induction ceremony into the NYS Writers Hall of Fame will be the focus of the Empire State Book Festival Gala scheduled from 6-10 p.m. on Friday, April 9, 2010 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Albany, New York. The gala will kickoff the state’s first Empire State Book Festival. The Festival will bring together authors, illustrators, librarians, storytellers, publishers and booklovers to celebrate the literary heritage of New York State. It is free and open to the public. It will be held on Saturday, April 10th from 10 am to 5:30 p.m. in Meeting Rooms 1-7 at the Empire State Plaza, where readings, author signings and special presentations will take place.

The nominees into the NYS Writers Hall of Fame were chosen by a selection committee composed of Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation; Barbara Genco, retired librarian from Brooklyn Public Library and Editor of Collection Management at Reed Business, Brian Kenney, Editorial Director for Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and School Library Journal; Kathleen Masterson director of the New York State Council on the Arts Literary Program, Bertha Rogers, executive director of Bright Hill Press & creator of the New York State Literary website & map; Rocco Staino, chairman of the Empire State Book Festival and Hong Yao Associate Coordinator Collection Development Queens Library.

The NYS Writers Hall of Fame will be physically located on a temporary basis at the Albany Public Library until a more permanent location can be arranged.

The New York Library Association (NYLA) was founded in 1890 to lead in the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning, quality of life, and equal opportunity for all New Yorkers.

For additional information on the Empire State Book Festival and Writers Hall of Fame visit www.empirestatebookfestival.org or contact Michael J. Borges at the New York Library Association 1-800-252-NYLA.

NY Times Obituary: Louis Auchincloss

2010-02-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92

By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and CHARLES McGRATH

Published: January 27, 2010

Louis Auchincloss, a Wall Street lawyer from a prominent old New York family who became a durable and prolific chronicler of Manhattan’s old-money elite, died on Tuesday night in Manhattan. He was 92.

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Louis Auchincloss in 1985.

His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was caused by complications of a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Auchincloss lived on the Upper East Side.

Although he practiced law full time until 1987, Mr. Auchincloss published more than 60 books of fiction, biography and literary criticism in a writing career of more than a half-century. . . .

Admirers compared him to other novelists of society and manners like William Dean Howells, but Mr. Auchincloss’s greatest influence was probably Edith Wharton, whose biography he wrote and with whom he felt a direct connection. His grandmother had summered with Wharton in Newport, R.I.; his parents were friends of Wharton’s lawyers. He almost felt he knew Wharton personally, Mr. Auchincloss once said.

Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. “Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives.”

His detractors complained that Mr. Auchincloss’s writing was glib and superficial, or else that his subject matter was too dated to be of much interest. Writing in The New York Times in 1984, Michiko Kakutani said that while Mr. Auchincloss “is adept enough at portraying the effects of a rarefied milieu on character, his narrative lacks a necessary density and texture.”

“Like the shiny parquet floors of their apartment houses,” she added, “Mr. Auchincloss’s people are just a little too finely polished, a little too tidily assembled.”

The author Bruce Bawer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Mr. Auchincloss had the bad luck to live “in a time when the protagonists of literary fiction tend to be middle- or lower-class.”

. . . .

“Class prejudice” was Mr. Auchincloss’s response to his critics. “That business of objecting to the subject material or the people that an author writes about is purely class prejudice,” he said in an interview in 1997, “and you will note that it always disappears with an author’s death. Nobody holds it against Henry James or Edith Wharton or Thackeray or Marcel Proust.”

. . . .

Even near the end of his life, Mr. Auchincloss said the influence of his class had not waned. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly, and I’m still living in one!,” he told The Financial Times in 2007. “The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs — all the old clubs — are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbors are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today.”

Obituary: Louis Auchincloss

2010-02-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/27/AR2010012703263.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Lawyer and prolific author Louis Auchincloss, 92, dies

By Dennis Drabelle

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Louis Auchincloss, 92, a novelist, essayist, biographer, editor and lawyer whose literary beat was the decline of the old WASP world of power and privilege to which he belonged, died Jan. 26 at Lenox Hill Hospital, near his home in Manhattan. He had complications from a stroke.

The author of more than 60 books in a career stretching over seven decades, Mr. Auchincloss was best known for such novels as "The Rector of Justin" (1964), about the founding headmaster of an elite prep school, and "The Embezzler" (1966), about an upper-class Wall Street stockbroker who succumbs to temptation during the Great Depression.

Louis Stanton Auchincloss (pronounced AWK-in-closs) was born in the Long Island, N.Y., community of Lawrence on Sept. 27, 1917, and grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side. As a youth, he was put off by his father's arid practice as a corporate lawyer and drawn to his mother's artistic pursuits.

. . . . . . . . .

In 1965, Mr. Auchincloss got the jump on a literary movement by publishing "Pioneers & Caretakers: A Study of 9 American Women Novelists," including Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather and a writer with whom Mr. Auchincloss himself was often compared: Edith Wharton. Not only did he acknowledge the similarities; he wrote and edited several books about Wharton, one of them a brief biography. He also wrote biographies of Cardinal Richelieu, Queen Victoria, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and edited the diaries of two 19th-century Manhattan grandees, Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong.

New issues of the Edith Wharton Review

2010-01-25T12:37:00.000-08:00

The Fall and Spring 2009 issues of The Edith Wharton Review have been mailed to members. The EWR is a peer-reviewed journal indexed by the MLA, and it will soon be available through EBSCOhost.

To submit an essay to the EWR or for the Edith Wharton Essay Prize, go to http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/ewr.htm.

Recent Tables of Contents

Fall 2009

Asya, Ferda. "Report on the 2008-2009 Edith Wharton Collection Award of the Edith Wharton Society." Edith Wharton Review 25.2 (Fall 2009): 10.

Hoeller, Hildegard. Rev. of Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism by Jennifer Haytock . Edith Wharton Review 25.2 (Fall 2009): 11-12.

Nettels, Elsa. Rev. of Edith Wharton Through a Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Biological Issues in Her Fiction by Judith P. Saunders. Edith Wharton Review 25.2 (Fall 2009): 12-13.

Scott, Jacquelyn. "The 'lift of a broken wing': Darwinian Descent and Selection in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Summer." Edith Wharton Review 25.2 (Fall 2009): 1-9

Singley, Carol. Rev. of The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901-1930, ed. Shafquat Towheed. Edith Wharton Review 25.2 (Fall 2009): 14-15.

Spring 2009

Patten, Ann L. "The Spectres of Capitalism and Democracy in Edith Wharton's Early Ghost Stories." Edith Wharton Review 25.1 (Spring 2009): 1-8.

Totten, Gary. Rev. of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts by Emily Orlando. Edith Wharton Review 25.1 (Spring 2009): 9-14.

Wahl, Jenny. "Edith Wharton as Economist: An Economic Interpretation of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence." Edith Wharton Review 25.1 (Spring 2009): 15.

.

The Big Read: The Age of Innocence

2010-01-24T21:34:00.000-08:00

I am organizing, together with Bloomsburg Public Library, The Big Read, with funds from the NEA, on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence for the Columbia-Montour counties in April 2010. The Big Read is an initiative to encourage reading for pleasure and enlightenment, specifically young reluctant literary readers. For this project, we have brought together participants from Columbia-Montour counties, including school districts, schools, school libraries, public libraries, museums, theaters, bookstores, coffee houses, literary and historical societies, boutiques, stores and several organizations, to conduct reading and discussion series, exhibitions, film screenings, stage productions and activities on Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence throughout April 2010.

On April 5th, at our opening event, Carol Singley will give the keynote speech, and at the closing event, on April 30th, Abby Werlock will give a speech. I appreciate if our Big Read event can be posted on the Edith Wharton Society's Website.

Ferda Asya, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Director of International Studies LLC
Department of English
111A Bakeless Center for the Humanities
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
400 East Second Street
Bloomsburg, PA 17815-1301

E-mail: fasya@bloomu.edu

Film version of Summer

2009-12-28T09:58:00.000-08:00

New film version of Summer in production: http://www.summerthemovie.com/

Edith Wharton Society Research Award

2009-12-17T10:45:00.001-08:00

Deadline: March 15, 2010

Each year the Edith Wharton Society offers an Edith Wharton Collection Research Award of $1500 to enable a scholar to conduct research on the Edith Wharton Collection of materials at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Prospective fellows for the 2010-2011 award are asked to submit a research proposal (maximum length 5 single-spaced pages) and a resume by March 15, 2010 to Margaret Murray at murraym@wcsu.edu or at this address:

Margaret Murray
Professor of English
Western Connecticut State University
Danbury, CT 06810 USA

The research proposal should detail the overall research project, its particular contribution to Wharton scholarship, the preparation the candidate brings to the project, and the specific relevance that materials at the Beinecke collection have for its completion. The funds need to be used for transportation, lodging, and other expenses related to a stay at the library.

Notification of the award will take place by April15th and theaward can be used from May 1, 2010 till May 1, 2011. A final report will be due June 1, 2011. The Winner will be asked at that point to submit a short report essay to the Edith Wharton Review, which will briefly inform the readers of the EWR of the research done but will not be in the way of the winner publishing a scholarly article elsewhere as well.

Digested Classic: The Age of Innocence

2009-12-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

At The Guardian:

(excerpt)
Newland urged his horses on as the carriage raced along the coast road. "Sorry I'm a bit late," he said, though both he and Ellen knew that what he was really saying was that he loved her deeply, yet did not want to compromise her by making her his mistress.

"I've got to go now," Ellen replied, "I have to fend off Beaufort's unwanted attentions", though both she and Newland knew that what she was really saying was that she loved him deeply, yet did not want to compromise him by becoming his mistress.

Vote for The Mount

2009-10-28T14:19:00.001-07:00

Help The Mount raise money by voting for us at Tourism Cares!
The organization Tourism Cares, the philanthropic and education arm of the tourism industry, has developed a new initiative. This program, Save our Sites, enables the public to vote for a site which they would like to see supported, and Tourism Cares will award a grant to the winner. The Mount was chosen for the shortlist, and we would very much like to encourage all of our supporters to vote for us! The grants are for various purposes, and The Mount has applied for funds to help with some of the most immediate structural repairs which are a continuing and critical part of the restoration of the property. All you have to do is visit their website http://www.tourismcares.org/save-our-sites/polling-options and cast your vote by clicking on the list on the right of the page. Every vote counts and we hope that everyone who cares about The Mount will help us. Please take the time to help us by voting and letting all of your friends know to vote for The Mount! We appreciate your support!

Edith Wharton Always Had Paris

2009-10-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

New York Times: Edith Wharton Always Had Paris

See also the slideshow of Paris locations associated with her work.

LIKE many of the characters in her novels, Edith Wharton made frequent use of concealment, reserve and deception in her own life. So it was fitting that the leading American female writer of the early 20th century experienced her first and most likely only passionate love affair in the city of Paris, far removed from her homes in New York and New England.

The pleasure she found in Paris in the years before World War I became a cover for the pleasure she took from the clandestine relationship with Morton Fullerton, a handsome, Frenchified, well-read American cad who worked as Paris correspondent for The Times of London.

“I am sunk in the usual demoralizing happiness which this atmosphere produces in me,” Wharton wrote in a letter at the end of 1907. She added, “The tranquil majesty of the architectural lines, the wonderful blurred winter lights, the long lines of lamps garlanding the avenues & the quays — je l’ai dans mon sang!” (“I have it in my blood!”)

For Wharton, Paris was a place of liberation. Intellectual women like her were listened to in this city. The setting was both aesthetically beautiful and logistically enabling for her romance, which she embarked upon in her mid-40s and kept secret from both her husband and her circle of friends.

“Theirs was a discreet adultery,” said Hermione Lee, the author of “Edith Wharton” (Alfred A. Knopf), the definitive biography of the writer. “It worked in Paris in a way that it never would have in America.”

She and Fullerton plotted their encounters via the text-message technology of the era: a furious exchange of brief notes delivered often several times a day by the Paris postal system.

“At the Louvre at one o’c in the shadow” of Diana, she wrote in one note. Today, the white marble sculpture of Diana, the goddess of the hunt, nude and reclining, her right arm wrapped around the neck of a stag, sits in a little-visited room up four sets of stairs off the Louvre’s Marly sculpture court. It is an excellent meeting place for a private rendezvous.
Her apartment hotel, when she needed temporary lodging, was the Hôtel de Crillon, recently opened in a late-18th-century building on the Place de la Concorde, which catered, she felt, to a cultured crowd. She detested the Ritz, where the newly rich but uncultivated Americans stayed, calling it the Nouveau Luxe in her fiction.

There is no Wharton suite or bar in the Crillon. My search of the Crillon’s guest books kept in the safe turned up the signatures of several other luminaries who stayed in the early years: Andrew Carnegie in 1913, Theodore Roosevelt in 1914, King George V of Britain in 1915. But there is no entry by Wharton.

Since she had described her Crillon space as “a very nice apartment up in the sky, overlooking the whole of Paris,” the hotel management believes that she must have rented what is now the Bernstein Suite, the sixth-floor set of rooms named after Leonard Bernstein, the American composer and conductor, who lived there off and on until his death in 1990. With its two terraces that give out onto the Place de la Concorde and the Pleyel grand piano that he played in the living room, it goes for 8,220 euros (the equivalent of more than $12,000) a night.
[continue reading at above link]

The Wharton Salon

2009-08-06T14:23:00.001-07:00

June 18, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WHARTON PLAYS RETURN TO THE MOUNT
THE WHARTON SALON: Xingu (August 20-23)

[THE MOUNT, LENOX, MA] A new forward-looking theatre ensemble, The Wharton Salon, in partnership with The Mount returns the adapted stories of Edith Wharton to the stage August 20-23 for a limited run of two evening and two morning performances in the drawing room of Wharton's historic home. The Salon's first production will be the delightful comedy Xingu adapted by Dennis Krausnick featuring Wharton veteran actors Corinna May, Daniel Osman, Diane Prusha and Tod Randolph with newcomers Lydia Barnett-Mulligan, Jennie Burkhard Jadow, Rory Hammond and Karen Lee, directed by Catherine Taylor-Williams. Xingu performs Thursday and Friday at 5:30 pm, Saturday and Sunday at 10:30 am. Tickets are $35 General Admission and include a Day Pass to The Mount. For tickets and information, call 413-551-5113 or visit www.edithwharton.org; www.whartonsalon.org

"The Wharton plays were an enormous asset to the cultural life of the Berkshires and I am delighted we can bring them back in a new form,"
says Taylor-Williams. "I have missed the combination of these terrific actors, Wharton's home and her wonderful adapted stories. I am grateful to Susan Wissler and The Mount for the opportunity to share these plays with audiences once again, to Dennis Krausnick and Shakespeare & Company who began this work and inspired my love for Wharton, and I'm especially happy to be reunited with one of the most important characters in the plays, the house."

"We are thrilled to have The Wharton Salon with us at The Mount," says Executive Director Susan Wissler. "What an enlivening experience to see the stories of Edith Wharton performed in her historic home. We look forward to many great collaborations with The Wharton Salon"

Published in 1916, Edith Wharton's Xingu centers around Mrs. Ballinger (May), a society hostess in the town of Hillbridge, and the Lunch Club, a curious grouping of women who have gathered to host celebrated author, Osric Dane, (Randolph) with a discussion of her recent novel, The Wings of Death. The meeting is off to a terrible start, as no subjects of conversation can be found to endear the author to her audience and the meeting is heading for social disaster when the Club is "rescued" by the introduction of a fascinating subject, Xingu, by the Club's most unpredictable member, Fanny Roby (Lee). Roby immediately leaves, having remembered "a pressing engagement to play bridge" - celebrated author in tow. The Club members praise their good fortune of being rid of the author, and their knowledge of Xingu, until they make a startling discovery..

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born into a tightly controlled society known as "Old New York" at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a proper marriage. Wharton broke through these strictures to become one of America's greatest writers. Author of The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, she wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. Essentially self-educated, she was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Wharton Salon performs the stories of Edith Wharton and her contemporaries in adaptation, offering a unique intimacy between author, actor and audience, and a view of The Mount's fantastic gardens with the Berkshire hills beyond. Salon plays are performed in the air-conditioned drawing room, and on temperate days the terrace doors are open, welcoming the outdoors into the playing space.

The Mount was designed and built by Edith Wharton in 1902. The house, three acres of formal gardens, and extensive woodlands are open to the public daily May through October.

At A Glance:

Production: Xingu

Adapted from Edith Wharton, by Dennis Krausnick

Theatre: The Drawing Room at The Mount, 2 Plunkett Street, Lenox, MA

Director: Catherine Taylor-Williams

Stage Manager: Lyn Liseno

Costumes Coordinated by: Arthur Oliver

Cast: Lydia Barnett-Mulligan, Jennie Burkhard Jadow, Rory Hammond, Karen Lee, Corinna May, Daniel Osman, Diane Prusha and Tod Randolph

Dates/Times: Thursday, August 20 at 5:30 pm Friday August 21 at 5:30 pm Saturday August 22 at 10:30 am Sunday, August 23 at 10:30 am

Tickets: $35, General Admission. Includes Day Pass to The Mount.
Wheelchair accessible.

Box Office: 413-551-5113 Box Office hours: Monday-Friday 9am-5pm or www.edithwharton.org; www.whartonsalon.org

THE REEF on BBC7

2009-08-02T22:16:00.000-07:00

A radio play of The Reef is available online at BBC7: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00b5pxf/episodes/player

Lying on the couch at the Mount

2009-06-28T12:19:00.001-07:00

From Slate:

More recently, on a visit to Edith Wharton's country house in Lenox, Mass., I ducked into the empty living room and stretched out on the sofa, nap-style: Will regarding the ceiling from such an oddly intimate angle disclose a previously overlooked insight into the great woman herself? Only later did I stop to think that Wharton probably wasn't the napping type.

Edith Wharton letters

2009-06-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

Edith Wharton Predicts Her Future

A trove of 136 Edith Wharton letters—some written when Wharton was just fourteen years old—sold at Christie’s yesterday to an American educational institution for $182,500. It’s a tremendous treat for Wharton aficionados, because prior to this discovery—as Rebecca Mead points out in her essay this week—there was only one known letter by Wharton from before she was married, at the age of twenty-three, in 1885.

Mead explains that Wharton asked Anna Bahlmann, her governess and the recipient of the letters, to destroy them. But she didn’t, and Bahlmann’s niece, who inherited them, held on to them, too. They sat for some fifty years in an attic and for another forty in a safe-deposit box. The Christie’s auction is the first time the letters have been publicly shared.

A friend of mine pointed out that Edith Wharton’s first novella, published in 1900, is eerily apt. “The Touchstone” tells the story of a betrayal committed by an impoverished lawyer named Stephen Glennard, who is hoping to marry his beautiful and equally impoverished fiancée. By chance, Glennard discovers that he can sell the love letters written to him earlier by the famous late writer Margaret Aubyn. They sell for a hefty price, allowing Glennard and his fiancée to wed. But Glennard is preoccupied with the guilt over the sale, and feels incapable of overcoming his sense of shame and betrayal to Aubyn.

Wharton's letters

2009-06-25T18:40:00.001-07:00

There's a slide show of Edith Wharton's letters over at The New Yorker; the article is only in the print version, unfortunately.

Edith Wharton-Anna Bahlmann letters

2009-06-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

From the Christie's catalog:

Lot Description

WHARTON, Edith Newbold Jones (1862-1937). An extensive archive documenting her 42-year relationship with Anna Catherine Bahlmann (1849-1916), originally Edith's German language tutor, later her secretary and literary assistant. Comprising: 136 AUTOGRAPH LETTERS SIGNED ("E.N. Jones," "Herz" [heart], "E.W." etc), to Bahlmann ("Tonni"), various places (PenCraig, Rhode Island; The Mount, Lenox, Mass.; Venice, Paris, Rome, Washington Square, NY, etc.), 31 May 1874 - 15 September 1917. Includes one ALS from Edward ("Teddy") Robbins Wharton and 4 ALS of Edith Wharton to Bahlmann's niece after Anna Catherine's death. Some of the letters are quite lengthy, running to 8 and even 12 pages, 8vo and 12mo. (Many of Edith Wharton's letters with full transcripts).

[With:] BAHLMANN'S PERSONAL PAPERS AND EFFECTS: 24 letters from
various correspondents including Henry James (8/14/05); effects including clippings, programs, poems by acquaintances, typescript articles, a last will and testament, pamphlets on war-relief, ledgers and notebooks, a small sachet with ink drawing of young girl labeled "E.N. Jones 1875" etc. [With:] POSTCARDS: 46 from Edith and Anna Catherine's trip to North Africa, 1914; 278 additional postcards of European places and monuments.[With:] PHOTOGRAPHS: 25 pieces, many labeled by Bahlmann on verso, including portraits of Edith Wharton and other acquaintances, a number of large-format views and interior photographs of the Mount, 884 Park Avenue and other homes.

EDITH WHARTON'S LETTERS TO ANNA CATHERINE BAHLMANN: A HIGHLY IMPORTANT LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE, ENTIRELY UNPUBLISHED.

In about 1872, Edith's parents, on the suggestion of their Newport neighbors, the Lewis Rutherfurds, hired Anna Catherine Bahlmann (1849-1916), a young women of German ancestry, as tutor and later governess to the precocious 12-year-old Edith Newbold Jones, a voracious reader with strong literary inclinations. Their friendship became a close, enduring one. Years later, Edith Wharton spoke of Anna Bahlmann as "my beloved German teacher, who saw which way my fancy turned, and fed it with all the wealth of German literature, from the Minnesingers to Heine" (A Backward Glance, Lib. of America edn., p.820). In the following decades, Anna Catherine became Edith's confidant, critical reader and literary assistant. Bahlmann's influence on Wharton has remained unknown, but is richly documented in their extensive and entirely unpublished correspondence, which spans 1874 to Bahlmann's death in 1916. Its discovery permits significant new insights into the life and and literary work of Wharton.

The introduction to the Letters, ed. R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis, refers to "the oldest surviving" Wharton letter, dated 23 September 1874. The earliest letter in the Bahlmann archive (31 May 1874), pre-dates it by four months. "Almost twenty years must pass," the Lewises write, "before another letter by Edith Wharton comes into view." Remarkably, over forty of Wharton's letters in the Bahlmann archive are dated before 1894, thus filling in a major gap in Wharton's extant correspondence.

The early letters are filled with enthusiasm for her reading, which includes Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Longfellow's "Masque of Pandora," Edward Bulwer (whose work she disliked), the Eddas, Marlowe's Faustus, the Niebelungen, Milton, Shelley and Lowell's blank verse. "You are my supreme critic in these matters," she tells Bahlmann (10/17ca.1879). She notes when her own work is published, like an early sonnet, "St. Martin's Summer," for Scribner's; four poems for Atlantic (10/16/79), her popular "The Fulness of Life" (8/18/1891), a story "That Good May Come" (11/15/93) recalling "the hours we spent in writing it out together"; remarks that the The House of Mirth is having "unprecedented success" in the Revue de Paris (12/18/1907), and in a letter of 8/16/1913 asks Bahlmannn to suggest revisions of Custom of the Country.

[Read the rest at the above link. The letters went for $182,500]

The Mount in Victoria Magazine

2009-06-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

In the comments section on the post for getting The Mount on the quarter, Gina noted that Victoria magazine has a photo spread on The Mount--thanks for letting us know!

http://www.victoriamag.com/article.aspx?id=5824

Edith Wharton and American Psycho

2009-06-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

Walter Benn Michaels at Book Forum:

If American Psycho harks back to the great novels of Edith Wharton—novels of manners in which the hierarchy of the social order is always what’s at stake—The Wire is like a reinvention of Zola or Dreiser for a world in which the deification of the market is going out rather than coming in. Although, of course, you had to pay the HBO subscription fee to watch it.

John Edwards as Ethan Frome?

2009-05-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

Politics Italian-style looked particularly comical and benign this past week as Americans relived John Edwards’s marital betrayal on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in all its sad, sordid detail. Elizabeth Edwards, who has written a book, “Resilience,” about her personal trials, told all to Ms. Winfrey while her penitent husband slunk to another part of their North Carolina mansion, waiting his turn to answer to Ms. Winfrey — an Ethan Frome of his former self.

Dramatic adaptation of A Son at the Front

2009-05-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

From Broadway World

A Son at the Front, an original play by Allen Frantzen, will have its world premiere performances June 5, 6, and 7 at the Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago. Based on Edith Wharton's poignant novel about World War I, A Son at the Front explores the effects of war on the family and friends of a young man who is eager to do his duty. Frantzen has enlarged on Wharton's themes, crafting a story of an American home front torn by divisions over the nation's role in the raging European conflict, and a family torn by disagreement about a son's destiny.

Set in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1916 and 1917, the action plays out against the many strains that roiled public life: conflicts between rich and poor, capitalists and socialists, war resisters and a growing tide of anti-German feeling, Native Americans and neighbors with roots in Europe. A Son at the Front tells of the fate of a young man who signs up to be an ambulance driver in France even before America's formal entry into the war, and who subsequently enters the fighting. Meanwhile, his family and friends struggle to piece together their partial and differing understandings of his actions, his whereabouts, and his motivations, viewing events through conflicting perceptions of the young man himself and their own aspirations for him.
Additional information is available at sonatthefront.com.

Louis Auchincloss, Mrs. Astor, and Edith Wharton

2009-05-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

In his testimony, Mr. Auchincloss also described a lunch some 60 years later that he said had troubled him because she did not recognize him.

The lunch, at the Knickerbocker Club, took place in 2001, he said. “It was a great shock to me because she didn’t know me,” Mr. Auchincloss testified. “She knew she ought to know me.”

He said it was not the first time he had wondered about her. He said that in 1998, Mrs. Astor took part in a discussion about Edith Wharton at the Union Club and said she had known Wharton.

“This was astonishing to me,” Mr. Auchincloss said. “I’d written a biography of Edith Wharton. She had told me, which I knew to be true, that she’d never met Edith Wharton. She could have, but I happened to know she hadn’t.”

Nominations needed for EWS Executive Board and EWS Secretary

2009-04-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

From Laura Rattray, Nominations Chair:

Nominations are warmly invited for the EWS Executive Board and Secretary Positions. Please send completed forms to Laura Rattray by email (L.Rattray@hull.ac.uk) by the deadline of 1 July 2009. Further details available at http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/nominationform2.htm (http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/nominationform2.htm)

Lily Bart and pride

2009-04-07T17:54:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times, "Mind--When All You Have Left Is Your Pride":

The various flavors of pride may even feel similar on the inside, when the stakes are high enough. “She was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself,” wrote Edith Wharton of her tragic heroine Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth.” “Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed doors she did not open.” If you believe it, so will they.

Edith Wharton in the News: The Mount on SciFi and Age of Innocence on Gossip Girl

2009-03-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

>From Irene Goldman-Price:
Edith Wharton's home in the Berkshires, The Mount, is the subject of an episode of GhostHunters on the SciFi channel. The episode airs on March 25, 2009, at 9 p.m.EDT. http://www.scifi.com/ghosthunters/

>From Emily Orlando and Jessica McCarthy:
The show _Gossip Girl_ (on the CW network), which frequently referencesWharton and her works in its themes, recently devoted an episode to a schoolproduction of _The Age of Innocence_. The episode is available here:http://www.cwtv.com/cw-video/gossip-girl/full/?play=423-5376

Anna Quindlen on Edith Wharton

2009-03-05T11:07:00.001-08:00

From the Buffalo News:

Quindlen, who has written more than a dozen books, said she has always been a voracious reader.

“I have a copy of Edith Wharton’s ‘House of Mirth’ that looks like a middle schooler had lunch on it,” she said.

“I believe with all my heart that reading made me what I am today. It has made me a better writer, a better citizen and a better mother. I can’t imagine my life without reading,” Quindlen added.

The Mount on the quarter

2009-02-12T10:02:00.000-08:00

From EWS member Irene Goldman-Price:

Help Us Put The Mount on the Quarter!

We’re usually asking you to give us a quarter, but today we want you to put us ON the quarter!

Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Mint will be placing important national sites on the back of the quarter, and The Mount has a chance to be chosen. Please follow this link and vote for us:

http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=gov3utilities&sid=Agov3&U=quarters_program

You may vote as often as you like until the deadline of February 26. There’s a lot of competition, but it would certainly be a great honor and would give us incomparable publicity. Many thanks for your support!

********

There is additional information at a new blog, Help Save The Mount! This blog has great information about the activities and lectures at the Mount as well as a direct link for donations.

Edith Wharton's birthplace

2008-12-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times

LIKE several of its neighbors on West 23rd Street, the five-story structure at No. 14 began life as a brownstone but later was converted for commercial use. For many years the ground-floor tenant was Scott’s Flowers, which had three permanent residents: two enormous stuffed bears and a midsize gray-and-white cat named Scottie.

Picture History, 1880

Edith Wharton’s birthplace as it once appeared.

Each morning the bears were hauled out to sun themselves on a bench in front of the shop, and Scottie emerged to plop himself down on the sidewalk and invite passers-by to scratch his back.

In 2007, Scott’s Flowers, along with Scottie, decamped to a new location. The new tenant is a Starbucks. And Starbucks, in the process of reconfiguring a flower shop into a coffee bar, has accidentally recreated a lost vista from the childhood of an earlier resident of No. 14, a little girl known as Pussy Jones, who grew up to be Edith Wharton.

No plaque proclaims the connection. But somewhere behind No. 14’s cast-iron facade stands the shell of the brownstone where Wharton was born on Jan. 24, 1862. In Wharton’s novella “New Year’s Day,” the narrator recalls a visit to his grandmother’s house on 23rd Street, clearly modeled on Wharton’s childhood home.

The house, Wharton writes, had been built by the narrator’s grandfather “in his pioneering youth, in days when people shuddered at the perils of living north of Union Square — days that Grandmamma and my parents looked back to with a joking incredulity as the years passed and the new houses advanced steadily Park-ward, outstripping the Thirtieth Streets, taking the Reservoir at a bound, and leaving us in what, in my school days, was already a dullish back-water between Aristocracy to the south and Money to the north.”

Directly across the street from No. 14 is the south entrance of 200 Fifth Avenue, an office building erected in 1909 on the site of the recently demolished Fifth Avenue Hotel. The office building was constructed according to the hotel’s plan, so its south entrance is located in the same place as the hotel’s, which was directly across the street from the parlor of Wharton’s home.

“She was bad ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.” Thus begins “New Year’s Day,” as the narrator’s waspish mother reiterates her disapproval of the notorious Lizzie Hazeldean, whose affair with Henry Prest had scandalized New York society. The reference to the famous old hotel reminds the narrator that when he was a boy, he had witnessed Lizzie’s downfall himself. It happened on a New Year’s Day in the 1870s, when his family had gathered at the house on 23rd Street, and their luncheon was interrupted by shouts that the Fifth Avenue Hotel was on fire.

“The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable,” he tells us. “No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by ‘politicians’ and ‘Westerners,’ two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.”

IN real life, the power brokers who frequented the Fifth Avenue Hotel were the people who ran the country during the Gilded Age. But Wharton did not label this the Age of Innocence for no reason. Oblivious to their own irrelevance, the aristocrats of “New Year’s Day” look down their noses at the overdressed and underbred revelers who converge on the Fifth Avenue to celebrate the holiday.

When the fire starts, the family rushes into the parlor to chortle at the hotel guests spilling out onto the sidewalk in their vulgar finery: “Oh, my dear, look — here they all come! The New Year ladies! Low neck and short sleeves in broad daylight, every one of them! Oh, and the fat one with the paper roses in her hair ... they are paper, my dear ... off the frosted cake, probably! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” Then someone recognizes Lizzie and Henry among those smoked out by the blaze, and the novella’s plot kicks into gear.

Jane Smiley, Edith Wharton, Jose Saramago

2008-12-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20081221_An_author_pondering__not_fearing__death.html
In her book about writing fiction (still a good guide, I think), Edith Wharton says a novelist's main job is to think about his or her subject thoroughly. If she had said unexpectedly, charmingly, profoundly, imaginatively and simply, too, she would have been describing José Saramago in Death With Interruptions.

Katy Lederer on Galbraith and Wharton

2008-12-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

"Ballad of the Bubble" in The New Yorker:
Then, in 2004, she spent a month at Yaddo. For reading, she took along study materials for the Series 7 stockbroker’s exam, as well as books by Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith. “Veblen talks about poetry as being similar to Latin, useless and a waste of time,” she said. “It’s a form of conspicuous consumption.” Still, Lederer said, she was struck by the metaphors he and Galbraith used. “The language is gorgeous,” she said. “Like Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, Galbraith is witty and sarcastic.” She started to crib phrases like “dead-level,” “squirrel wheel,” and “immiseration of the masses” for her verse.

Julian Fellowes on Edith Wharton

2008-12-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

From One Minute with Julian Fellowes:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you like her/him

Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton. I like that they're so merciful. No character is completely indefensible, or completely good. Motives are always drawn in shades of grey.

Louis Auchincloss and Wharton

2008-12-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

Last of the Old Guard

Louis Auchincloss’s 65th novel finds relevance in Wall Street attorneys of a bygone era.
By Heller McAlpin | December 15, 2008 edition

Last of the Old Guard By Louis Auchincloss Houghton Mifflin 212 pp., $25

Some people make the rest of us look like idlers. Case in point: Louis Auchincloss, who has written, on average, a book a year for six decades – even while practicing trust and estate law full-time for more than 40 of those years.

At 91, he’s produced his 65th book overall and 47th volume of fiction, Last of the Old Guard. The title refers to Ernest Saunders, a chilly New York attorney whose greatest passion is the law firm he founded with a Harvard classmate in 1883.

But Auchincloss, who was honored as a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy back in 2000, may well feel like the last of the old guard himself.

There’s something oddly comforting about reading this patrician novelist of manners, successor to Edith Wharton. You know, to a certain degree, what you’ll be served – rather like eating at an exclusive social club.

Hauntings at The Mount

2008-11-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

Hauntings at The Mount
Updated: 10/31/2008 04:58 PM
By: Ryan Burgess

LENOX, Mass. -- "I've been alone in the building, very late at night, dark and it is extremely creepy," said The Mount tour guide Laurie Foote.

Slamming doors and creaky floors, they're the spooky sounds of a haunted jaunt with ghosts who want to scare you. This is a real-life mansion in Lenox that some say has been haunted for years. It's the storied home of novelist Edith Wharton, called The Mount, a place where workers who lived on the fourth floor never wanted to be alone.

"They lived up in these rooms and downstairs and they were all absolutely convinced that there were ghosts here because they would hear huge creeks and slamming doors and people walking down the hallway," said Foote. [read more at the link above]

Glimpses of the Moon Musical

2008-11-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

From Photo Flash:

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON, a Jazz Age musical with book & lyrics by Tajlei Levis and music by John Mercurio, choreographed by Denis Jones, and directed by Marc Bruni, premiered with a sold-out run in the Oak Room last winter. GLIMPSES OF THE MOON is back by popular demand for an ongoing run at Off-Broadway's Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street, between 5th and 6th Ave.). Performances began Sunday, October 26.

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON is based on one of Edith Wharton's rare comedies. Set in 1922, an age of anything but innocence, GLIMPSES OF THE MOON follows the jazzy whirl of Manhattan society. With plenty of friends, but little money, Susy Branch and her friend Nick Lansing devise a clever scheme to live beyond their means. They'll marry and live off the wedding gifts, while they help one another trade up to suitable millionaires. The plan works perfectly - until they fall in love.

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON stars Autumn Hurlbert (Legally Blonde) as Susy, and Chris Peluso (Mamma Mia and Lestat) as Nick, also starring is Jane Blass (Hairspray Nat'l Tour) as Ellie, Laura Jordan (Cry Baby and In My Life) as Coral, Daren Kelly (Crazy for You, Woman of the Year, Deathtrap, South Pacific) as Nelson and Glenn Peters as Streffy. The understudies are Russell Arden Koplin (Les Miserables and James Joyce's The Dead) and Matt Lutz.

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON plays every Monday at 8 pm. Doors open at 6:00 PM and seating is general admission. Final seating for dinner service is at 6:30 PM. Doors close at 7:30 PM and there is no late seating permitted.

Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman design nurseries

2008-11-16T11:15:00.000-08:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

This impulse isn't new or entirely bad. In "The Decoration of Houses" (1897), Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman devote a chapter to the design of the nursery and schoolroom. In a bossy but effective tone, Wharton laments the "superfluous gimcrack" and floods of "bric-a-brac" that dominated children's rooms in her day. "The daily intercourse with poor pictures, trashy 'ornaments,' and badly designed furniture may, indeed, be fittingly compared with a mental diet of silly and ungrammatical story books." She singles out for special opprobrium the "bead-work cushions" and "mildewed Landseer prints of foaming, dying animals" that dotted the nation's nurseries. Wharton refuses to pander to childish tastes: She suggests Bronzino's portraits of the Medici babies and a few reproductions of Italian frescoes for a child's walls, for example, all meant to surround children with objects of quality.

As Wharton well understood, the home is where children are socialized and where their taste is first cultivated -- or corrupted.

Glimpses of the Moon

2008-11-16T11:13:00.000-08:00

From Huffington Post:

One of the more rueful lines in Glimpses of the Moon, a Jazz Age musical, is the carefree exchange between two women. The young, romance-seeking blonde asks: "Don't you believe in love?" Her more jaded friend snaps back: "I believe in Lehman Bros." In 1922, when Edith Wharton wrote those lines, everyone laughed. Today, they are met with a knowing sigh. Apparently, love is a safer bet.

At least, if you follow the Twenties romp now playing at the Algonquin's Oak Room.

Though the sight lines are a bit compromised, the musical was written specifically for the intimate room, long a cabaret favorite. Playing every Monday at 8 p.m. at the famed hotel, Glimpses of the Moon is a frothy concoction with a tart twist. The show is based on a Wharton book, an author known more for cutting social commentary than comedy. But there are lots of witty lines here, and the production nicely captures an era when the rich lived in a madcap whirl of money, affairs, endless champagne and a casual disregard for anything except their own fun.

Dance play of House of Mirth

2008-11-16T11:12:00.001-08:00

http://www.boston.com/ae/events/articles/2008/11/16/globe_west_best_bets/
Waltham: Choreographer Susan Dibble transforms a great work of literature into a dance play in her adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1905 novel "The House of Mirth." Titled "Tea and Flowers, Purity and Grace," the piece features 24 dances with a narrator (played by professional actor Nigel Gore). Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday and next Sunday at 2 p.m. in Brandeis University's Spingold Theater, 415 South St. $18-$20. 781-736-3400.

Saving The Mount

2008-11-09T13:51:00.001-08:00

Saving The Mount
By Clarence Fanto, Special to The Eagle
Article Launched: 11/09/2008 01:00:00 AM EST

Sunday, November 09
LENOX

She may turn out to be the savior of The Mount, the former home of novelist Edith Wharton that has been threatened with foreclosure since last winter over $9 million in debts.

Susan Wissler is seeking a solid financial footing by expanding the mission of Edith Wharton Restoration Inc., which owns the estate built in 1902. Wharton lived there until 1911.

That includes creating a new "Wharton Center for the Written Word," that will offer literary conferences, workshops and movies to the public, opening a terrace "cafe" to the public evenings in summer, and keeping the house open for tours on weekends through December.

Wissler was named interim executive director on March 29, after longtime chief Stephanie Copeland declined a Board of Trustees offer of a lesser position. In August, "interim" was removed from Wissler's title.

Although a six-month lifeline floated by The Mount's creditors, led by Berkshire Bank, expired on Oct. 31, "the threat of foreclosure has been forestalled as a result of the steady progress we've made this summer," Wissler said this past week. "Our banks and creditors have concluded that it makes the most sense to give us additional time to work out long-term restructuring plans.

Read the rest of the article at the Berkshire Eagle

Glimpses of the Moon Musical

2008-10-19T21:03:00.001-07:00

Back by Popular Demand… Glimpses of the Moon: A Jazz Age Musical
We invite members of the Edith Wharton Society and friends to attend performances of the new musical adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1922 novel, GLIMPSES OF THE MOON. This sparkling Jazz Age musical will be presented at the famed Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan on Monday evenings at 8 pm, starting on October 27th, 2008.

Set in 1922, an age of anything but innocence, GLIMPSES OF THE MOON follows the jazzy whirl of New York society. With plenty of friends but little money, Susy Branch and her friend Nick Lansing devise a clever scheme to live beyond their means. They'll marry and live off the wedding gifts while they help each other trade up to millionaires. The plan works perfectly – until they fall in love.

The musical is directed by Marc Bruni (Associate Director of Legally Blonde and Grease on Broadway) and choreographed by Denis Jones. The cast of six includes Autumn Hurlbert (Legally Blonde) and Chris Peluso (Mamma Mia) as well as special guest appearances by popular cabaret artists. The adaptation and lyrics are by Tajlei Levis with music by composer John Mercurio. The show is produced by Sharon Carr Associates.

For tickets, contact ticketweb.com or call 866.468.7619. Mention code EWMOON for a special discount for friends of the Edith Wharton society. Group discounts are available – please contact info@glimpsesOfTheMoon.com for further information and group sales.

Thanks to an enthusiastic response from critics and audiences, the show sold out its entire run last winter. The show is now returning to the Oak Room with performances every Monday night at 8pm, starting October 27th. The Algonquin Hotel is located at 59 West 44th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenue, in Manhattan.

The critics rave...

"One of the best new musicals I've seen in ages" --Duncan Pflaster, BroadwayWorld.com

"Glimpses of the Moon has already bested most of the current crop of musicals for civilized entertainment" --Michael Dale, Showtime!

"A one of a kind New York experience... Don't miss getting a glimpse of this moon!" --Bixby Elliot, Yahoo Broadway.

We hope you will join us for a wonderful evening in the Oak Room.

Hope for historic home

2008-09-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

From the Berkshire Eagle:

Though The Mount's leaders won't reach the $3 million fundraising target by Oct. 31 required by Berkshire Bank, $1.3 million has been raised through the "Save the Mount" campaign launched last winter, and more is anticipated in coming weeks, said the Mount's acting president, Susan Wissler. She said the chances are good that a donor will agree to step forth as well to match what funds are raised by Oct. 31.

Landmark trying to avoid foreclosure

2008-09-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

From the Albany Capital News 9 site:

Landmark trying to avoid foreclosure
Updated: 09/10/2008 06:57 AM
By: Ryan Burgess

LENOX, MA - Wendy Gash has been a tour guide at this National Historic Landmark in Lenox called The Mount for years. She said a lot has stayed the same on the tours she gives, except for how she says goodbye to the guests.

"I have a little ending to my tour. I tell them, if you've enjoyed yourself, bring all your rich friends who have an extra $1 million or so and we accept checks," said Gash.

They take cash, check, or credit because the former home of famed novelist Edith Wharton is just a month and a half away from the auction block.

Landmark trying to avoid foreclosure
Time is running out for a national historic landmark in Lenox that's facing foreclosure. Our Ryan Burgess went to The Mount on Tuesday to find out if it can raise enough money to stay off the auction block.

"We are still up against a deadline of October 31 to raise $3 million," said The Mount Executive Director Susan Wissler.

If that money is not raised, The Mount faces foreclosure. So far, only about $1.2 million has been raised, but they are hoping to negotiate an extension with their bank. In spite of the looming deadline, officials here say donations keep coming.

"Fundraising is actually continuing at a steady pace. We got a $50,000 gift actually within the last couple of weeks and I just got news of another $25,000 donation thats coming within the next ten days or so," said Wissler.

One ticket booth worker said that the first question people ask when they pull up is, how's the fundraising going? But even with all that interest, The Mount says it still has a long way to go before it can reach its fundraising goals.

VICTORIA MANSION TO READ AND CELEBRATE THE AGE OF INNOCENCE DURING THE BIG READ PROJECT

2008-07-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

VICTORIA MANSION TO READ AND CELEBRATE THE AGE OF INNOCENCE DURING THE BIG READ PROJECT

Portland, Maine’s Victoria Mansion is pleased to announce that it has received a $7,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to host The Big Read in the Greater Portland Area and that it is the only Maine organization hosting The Big Read. Victoria Mansion is one of 208 libraries, municipalities, and arts, culture, higher education, and science organizations to receive a grant to host The Big Read from September 2008-June 2009. The Big Read gives communities the opportunity to come together to read, discuss, and celebrate one of 23 selections from American and world literature. The Big Read in Portland will focus on The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Activities will take place beginning March 2009.

The latest Big Read grantees represent 46 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. To date, the NEA has given more than 500 grants to support local Big Read projects.

Victoria Mansion’s Director Robert Wolterstorff said of the grant, “I am thrilled to be taking part in The Big Read. We’ve received major federal grants for restoration projects before, but this is the first one to support programming, and it’s a great honor to receive this grant in the year we celebrate our 150th Anniversary.”
“Everything the NEA does we do in partnership. I am delighted to announce our 208 new partners in The Big Read. Some are new to the program, some are returning, but all of them have answered the call to action to get our country reading again,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “I am very pleased that Victoria Mansion, Inc. has been awarded this grant. Reading and discussing the same book will be a great way for diverse members of the Greater Portland community to share thoughts about this American classic and its relevance to today’s society.” (Tom Allen, US Representative)

The selected organizations will receive Big Read grants ranging from $2,500 to $20,000 to promote and carry out community-based reading programs featuring activities such as read-a-thons, book discussions, lectures, movie screenings, and performing arts events. Participating communities also receive high-quality, free-of-charge educational materials to supplement each title, including Reader’s, Teacher’s, and Audio Guides. Victoria Mansion is also thrilled to announce that they have received The Major Grant of $4,000 from the Maine Humanities Council to support The Big Read programming.

“With this latest round of grants, I am proud to say that The Big Read has supported more than 500 public library partnerships,” said Anne-Imelda M. Radice, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NEA’s lead federal partner for The Big Read. “Through this program, public libraries continue to demonstrate their value in communities as centers of engagement, literacy, and lifelong learning. I am particularly delighted by the innovative public programming born out of library and museum collaborations.”

To encourage community-wide participation in The Big Read, Victoria Mansion has partnered with Portland Public Library, Maine Humanities Council, and Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. In addition, the American and New England Studies Program, the Education Department, and the School of Music at the University of Southern Maine; Livermore Falls High School; Skyline Farm; and a host of community, library, social, and local book groups will be involved with The Big Read. To participate in Victoria Mansion’s Big Read programs or for more information on events related to The Big Read, please contact Tracy Quimby at tquimby@victoriamansion.org.

The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. Support for The Big Read is provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Transportation for The Big Read is provided by Ford. For more information about The Big Read please visit www.neabigread.org.

Victoria Mansion, a National Historic Landmark, is located in Portland, Maine. Our mission is to conserve,
maintain, and restore the Victoria Mansion property and collections to the highest standards, and to interpret them in their social, historical, and art-historical context to a broad local, state, and national audience. The Mansion is open for its regular season of tours May – October, Monday through Saturday, 10-4, Sunday 1-5. All tours are guided and reservations are not necessary for groups under 10. The Carriage House Gift Shop, featuring beautiful Victorian inspired gifts, decorations, jewelry and books is open the same hours as the museum and may be visited without paying admission. Please visit www.victoriamansion.org.

The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts—both new and established—bringing the arts to all Americans, and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the nation’s largest annual funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases. For more information, please visit www.arts.gov.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute’s mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. For more information, please visit www.imls.gov.

Arts Midwest connects people throughout the Midwest and the world to meaningful arts opportunities, sharing creativity, knowledge, and understanding across boundaries. Arts Midwest connects the arts to audiences throughout the nine-state region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. One of six non-profit regional arts organizations in the United States, Arts Midwest’s history spans more than 25 years. For more information, please visit www.artsmidwest.org.

EW in Maine, 1907

2008-07-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

http://bangornews.com/news/t/lifestyle.aspx?articleid=167373&zoneid=63

On Isleboro, Maine:

Edith Wharton was a visitor in 1907, and ex-President Theodore Roosevelt stopped in to see his daughter in 1917. Famous yachtsmen such as J.P. Morgan and George W. Vanderbilt wouldn’t dream of passing by without a stopover on their way to Bar Harbor.

2008-06-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

The Mount: foreclosure deadline extended to October 31

2008-05-16T12:20:00.000-07:00

From the Berkshire Eagle

October climax set for The Mount
By Benning W. De La Mater, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Article Last Updated: 05/14/2008 09:44:51 AM EDT

Wednesday, May 14
LENOX — An agreement between The Mount and its creditors has staved off foreclosure and a May 31 deadline that would have forced Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. to raise $3 million by the end of the month.

Instead, the historic home of the Gilded Age writer will be open to the public all summer without a threat of foreclosure by Berkshire Bank. The new fundraising deadline has been set for Oct. 31.

Susan Wissler, The Mount's acting CEO and president, said the spirits of the staff were high after they received word of the reprieve Monday. And if opening weekend was any barometer (The Mount opened on Friday), then Wharton's fans are pulling for the home to make it through the financial crisis: Wissler said attendance was up 50 percent from average opening weekends and nearly $8,000 in revenue was generated during the first three days.

"We hope that was a strong harbinger of what's to come," Wissler said. "A lot of the customers were talking about our situation. We had a couple fly in from Seattle just to see The Mount."

Young Indy

2008-05-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

From a review of The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Volume Three - The Years of Change at Blogcritics:
The First World War is essentially over and continues for only the first two episodes. The intrigue of that war and what destruction it wrought on a whole generation still make it the most interesting backdrop for these Indiana Jones stories. The first one, "Tales Of Innocence" is a simple tale and maybe my favorite in this collection. The two stories - Indy and Ernest Hemingway falling in love with the same woman and Indy and Edith Wharton developing a forbidden attraction to each other while Indy searches for a traitor - are light on the surface but that belies a hidden depth. These unrequited loves hint at what will become the post-war "Lost Generation." After what Indy has seen in the War, what meaning will there be in life? And how does he truly give his heart when he's seen so much death and destruction?

Bank gives The Mount a reprieve

2008-04-24T09:49:00.001-07:00

From the Berkshire Eagle:

Bank gives The Mount a reprieve
Ellen G. Lahr, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Article Last Updated: 04/24/2008 09:12:12 AM EDT

Thursday, April 24
LENOX — Berkshire Bank has extended until May 31 a $3 million fundraising deadline for Edith Wharton Restoration Inc., and The Mount will open May 9 for the season while the nonprofit seeks to restructure its debt with key creditors, according to an announcement last night.

Berkshire Bank, which is now owed nearly $4.4 million in mortgage and line-of-credit debt, had given The Mount until today, to meet its goal, with the threat of foreclosure looming for the nonprofit historic house site.

This is the second extension granted by the bank.

Susan Wissler, The Mount's acting CEO and president, said last night that May will be a month of heavy negotiations to restructure long-term debt with key creditors, including Berkshire Bank. The Mount owes a total of nearly $9 million to creditors, with secured and unsecured loans to the organization.

"Opening sends a strong message to the public that we do not intend to go down without a fight," Wissler said. "It also generates much needed additional revenues to help stave off our creditors. With all of the recent publicity, we are anticipating a very robust season."

Wissler said the extension is exciting
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news, along with the donation tally showing that, in the past 30 days, the "Save the Mount" campaign has raised $240,000, reflecting 600 contributions from around the country. A total of 1,300 individuals have pledged since February, when the nonprofit announced that it was out of cash and missed a $300,000 payment to the bank.

The recent gifts include more than $100,000 from donors whose funds are immediately available to permit The Mount to ready itself for the 2008 season. Among the donors: former Walt Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner and his wife, Jane, who gave $25,000, according to Wissler.

The Eisners gave after learning of the financial crisis by a recent New York Times opinion piece urging New Yorkers to help save The Mount, as Edith Wharton was a New Yorker herself.

"Mr. Eisner is passionate about Wharton's writings, and we are delighted that the Eisners have lent their support to our cause," said Wissler, who said she was contacted by the Eisner Foundation earlier this month.

Wharton's House Wins a Reprieve

2008-04-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times

Wharton's House Wins a Reprieve

By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: April 24, 2008

The Mount, Edith Wharton’s house in Lenox, Mass., which has been in financial trouble for months, has been given another reprieve. In February a local bank that had been lending money to the Edith Wharton Restoration, the organization that owns and maintains the house, to cover operating expenses, threatened to begin foreclosure unless the Mount raised $3 million by March 24. The deadline was later extended to April 24, and Hannah Burns, one of the trustees, said on Wednesday that it had been pushed back yet another month, to May 24, which means that the house will now be able to open for visitors as scheduled on May 9. So far more than $800,000 of the needed sum has been raised.

Edith Wharton's Reputation

2008-04-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

As Mr. Zaid observes, the posthumous stature of an author's work can lurch wildly. In the 1930s, Edmund Wilson deflated Edith Wharton's over-large reputation; then it grew beyond what it was before; and now the critic Andrew Delbanco has brought it back down again to human scale. But the status of a businessman's claim to fame is subject to much the same kind of variance: "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," as patriarch Sam Bronfman used to say worriedly about his distillery business, despite its seemingly unassailable success.

Editor's note: Is the piece referred to here Edmund Wilson's "Justice to Edith Wharton," and, if so, does anyone know why it is considered here as an essay that deflated her reputation?

From Andrew Delbanco's review of Hermione Lee's biography:

This book is a powerful rebuttal to that view. It builds on the work of previous scholars -- on Lewis's biography, on Blake Nevius's study of Wharton's methods of revision, on Cynthia Griffin Wolff's psychological insights, and many more. And it comes at an interesting moment in the history of Wharton's reputation, which was highest in the 1920s, when she was selling well and winning prizes. By the 1930s, her stock was falling, as the claims of modernism took hold and the Depression made her characters and themes seem precious and indulgent. In 1939, not long after her death, Clifton Fadiman, then the books editor at the New Yorker, could write that those who continued to read her did so for reasons of "class fidelity." In the postwar years, Wharton held her own as a literary worthy -- though often paired with James as a lesser disciple -- but it was really not until the 1970s, with the surge of interest in women's studies, that she became a major writer again. This time she came back as an unexpected "Do Me" feminist. The affair with Fullerton and the discovery of "Beatrice Palmato," a fragment of erotic writing with an incest theme (probably written around 1919), intensified interest in her as a writer about women abused by inattention or exploitation, who are sexual furnaces waiting to be stoked. By the 1990s, helped by Martin Scorsese's fine film of The Age of Innocence -- which, as Scorsese discovered, is about high-society people as merciless as any gangster -- Wharton had become a popular writer of lush period pieces.

With all these versions of Wharton now behind us, the question is whether interest in her work will now be renewed again, and if so, for what reasons. She is a writer who flatters the self-satisfied rich even as she anatomizes them, by granting them their materialist premise: that the acquisition, the display, and the transmission of money are the primary activities of life. Only rarely does an alternative way of living come into view in her work. In our age of twentysomething i-bankers, when fortunes are quickly made and quickly lost, Wharton may well find a new audience -- but will it be more interested in her views of the interior life or of interior decoration? Is she finally a writer who points beyond getting and spending, or a writer nostalgic for the first Gilded Age who shows us, in luscious detail, how it once was done? Hermione Lee has presented the best possible case for the former. The jury in our own gilded age is still out.

From Slate on The Mount (includes many pictures of the interior)

2008-04-21T19:16:00.000-07:00

Save the Mount!Why Edith Wharton's house is an architectural treasure.
By Kate Bolick
Posted Monday, April 21, 2008, at 7:22 AM ET

Outside design circles, not many people know that Edith Wharton's first publication was a decorating manual. It's a perplexing fact. Our own American grande dame, author of more than 40 books, friend of Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt … bothered herself with wallpaper and sconces? (Actually, she loathed wallpaper.) But after the initial shock, perhaps you'll remember reading The Age of Innocence or seeing Martin Scorsese's film adaptation of it and realize that Wharton is fused in your mind with masterfully described interiors—at which point, your confusion will click into a satisfied "Huh!" If so, you might be moved, as I was, to rent a car and go visit the Mount, the only one of Wharton's many residences remaining. But act fast: If the Mount doesn't somehow acquire $3 million by April 24, the bank is going to shut it down. The interiors you're about to see may be lost to the public forever.

Hermione Lee to speak on Wharton in New York on April 14

2008-04-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

From Brandon Judell, Coordinator
The Simon H. Rifkind Center
City College

Guest Speaker: Hermione Lee
Date: April 14, Monday
Time: 6:30
FREE
Locale: City College
160 Convent Avenue
NYC, NY 10031

To get there: Take the number one train to 135th Street. And then one block east on 138th Street.

The building is Shepard Hall, Room 250.

The Mount: Trustees hopeful financial help coming

2008-04-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

From the Berkshire Eagle (read the rest by clicking on this link):

The Mount: Trustees hopeful financial help coming
By Ellen G. Lahr, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Article Last Updated: 04/07/2008 09:43:48 AM EDT

Monday, April 07
LENOX — The coffers of Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. grew by $30,000 this week, after the trustees held a public meeting to air the organization's fiscal status and to appeal for financial help to prevent a foreclosure at The Mount.

Total donations topped $600,000 on Friday, said Gordon Travers, a trustee of The Mount, who appeared to answer questions on Monday with others.

He said he hopes that this week's donations signal growing awareness of The Mount's predicament.

Employees at The Mount, the historic home of novelist and playwright Edith Wharton, are making tentative plans to open the museum house for the season, but Berkshire Bank will decide whether to allow more time.

Change of Venue for Edith Wharton and History Conference

2008-04-04T06:04:00.001-07:00

The following message will be sent to participants in the Edith Wharton and History Conference, but it should also be read by those intending to attend the conference who have not yet registered. See also the conference site for any updates.

--Donna Campbell

Dear Participants:

We are writing to inform you that we had to make some changes to the location of the Edith Wharton Conference. The conference was fully planned out, when we suddenly learnt that the Seven Hills Inn was being sold and could or would not accommodate us. Even though our contract with them has a stipulation that the contract would hold even in the case of a sale, the Inn refused to honor that contract since the inn will undergo transitional repairs during the time of our planned stay there. We had no choice but to relocate the conference. It will now be held at The Crowne Plaza at One West St., Pittsfield, MA, 01201. The Crowne Plaza is a modern conference center/hotel , which is 8.7 miles from The Mount. The website is www.crowneplaza.com. The phone is (413) 499-2000. Crowne Plaza is a Priority Club member, and we look forward to enjoying the vastly upgraded hospitality that they offer. Please see the bottom of this letter for a new menu choice for the banquet.

We also, unfortunately, cannot be certain that The Mount will be open, since it is threatened by foreclosure. We are keeping an eye on that situation every week. However, if it is open, members of the Edith Wharton Society have volunteered to drive those who need transportation to The Mount. All this said, the conference itself is no different than it was planned ; it is still a juried conference, the location is still in the beautiful Berkshire area, and the cost for accommodations will be somewhat lower: Thurs. night is $119 and Fri. night is $139. Seven Hills is now in the process of refunding room deposits to the credit cards on which those deposits were charged. We are looking for a vibrant exchange of ideas on Edith Wharton. We therefore hope that you will still come to the conference, but we would like you to let us know as soon as possible if these changes will affect your plans so that we can plan out the conference to its final shape. We will be accepting Conference registrations until April 30. If you have any additional questions, please contact Margaret Murray at drmpm@snet.net .

With many thanks, and looking forward to seeing you in June,

All best regards,

Hildegard Hoeller, P resident, Edith Wharton Society

Margaret Murray, Vice-president, Conference Director

If you have already registered, please send your new dinner selection to:

Dr. Carole Shaffer-Koros
Kean University
School of Visual and Performing Arts
1000 Morris Ave.
Union , NJ 07083

___Prime Rib ___Grilled Salmon with citrus sauce ___Chef’s Choice Vegetarian Entrée

Registration Form for Edith Wharton and History Conference

June 26-28, 2008
Crowne Plaza

One West Street

Pittsfield , MA 01201

(413) 499-2000

Registration fee of $125 includes 2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, 2 coffee breaks, cocktail party and banquet dinner.

Graduate Student rate: $100; undergraduates may register by the day, to include breakfast, lunch and coffee break, for $15 each day, with student i.d.

Reservation for rooms should be made at Crowne Plaza ; ask for the Edith Wharton Society rate, which is $119 for June 26, and $139 for June 27.

Questions about the Conference should be directed to Margaret Murray at drmpm@snet.net

Conference Registration (include check for $125; students should include copy of student ID), mail to:

Dr. Carole Shaffer-Koros
Kean University
School of Visual and Performing Arts
1000 Morris Ave.
Union , NJ 07083

NAME:__________________________________________________________

AFFILIATION:____________________________________________________

MAILING ADDRESS______________________________________________

EMAIL:________________________________________________________________

PHONE:________________________________________________________________

AMOUNT ENCLOSED: _________$125 _________$100 __________$15

BANQUET ENTRÉE (pick one):

___Prime Rib ___Grilled Salmon with citrus sauce ___Chef’s Choice Vegetarian Entrée

President of Wharton Estate Resigns

2008-03-31T16:52:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press

President of Wharton Estate Resigns

By MARK PRATT – 23 hours ago

BOSTON (AP) — The president and chief executive of the financially troubled estate of author Edith Wharton has stepped down rather than assume a different position in a restructured management hierarchy, trustees announced Sunday.

The five-member board of trustees at The Mount in Lenox said in a statement that they have accepted the resignation of Stephanie Copeland "with regret."

The organization that owns the estate, Edith Wharton Restoration, has borrowed $4.3 million for operating costs, but in January missed a $30,000 payment, prompting a bank to start foreclosure proceedings.

The estate made the payment with a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but it still trying to raise $3 million. So far about $570,000 has been raised, trustee Gordon Travers said Sunday.

An anonymous donor has promised another $3 million over five years if the fundraising goal is reached.

"Right now, we're month to month," he said.

The board determined that the future of The Mount lay in restructuring management.

"We concluded that if we made it through this fundraising campaign, if we had a future, we needed to separate finance and administration from the creative side," Travers said.

Copeland had essentially been fulfilling both tasks, but under the restructuring was offered the position of creative leader, which she rejected, the trustees said in a statement.

Open Meeting at The Mount, 3/31/08

2008-03-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

From the Berkshire Eagle:

Mount's debt to be open book
By Ellen G. Lahr, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Article Last Updated: 03/17/2008 10:00:38 AM EDT

Monday, March 17
You have questions? The Mount — hopefully — has answers.

Town officials and the local business community are teaming up to host a public meeting about The Mount at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 31, at Town Hall.

The Selectmen and the Lenox Chamber of Commerce are hosting the event, which The Mount's CEO and president, Stephanie Copeland, said is intended to answer as many questions as possible.

The Mount is in debt to its creditors by more than $8.7 million, and Berkshire Bank is threatening to foreclose on the historic home of Edith Wharton. The Mount has until April 24 — a deadline that was recently extended a month — to raise $3 million toward its bank debt of $4.3 million.

"So many people have questions, and it would be good to bring everyone in," Copeland said.

The Mount has until April 24 to raise the $3 million

2008-03-15T12:43:00.000-07:00

From the Berkshire Eagle:

Mount granted a month for debt
Berkshire Bank agrees to extend the deadline for Edith Wharton's estate to pay $3 million
By Ellen G. Lahr, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Article Last Updated: 03/15/2008 05:21:21 AM EDT

Saturday, March 15
LENOX — Berkshire Bank, which is warning of foreclosure proceedings against The Mount, has extended a deadline to raise $3 million following a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Berkshire said it had extended the deadline by 30 days. The Mount, the historic house and gardens of 19th century novelist Edith Wharton, now has until April 24 to come up with $3 million required by the bank, to clear up a large chunk of the $4.3 million owed on its mortgage and line of credit, which are in default.

The bank's total debt is more than $8.7 million, and its payments to all other major creditors are in default.

Stephanie Copeland, president and CEO of the Edith Wharton Restoration, said Berkshire Bank has "very graciously" agreed to the extension in light of new funds, which will cover operations for another 30 days.

Since Feb. 24, The Mount has raised more than $520,000 with an all-out fundraising blitz that seizes on the bank's foreclosure threat. The new, $30,000 grant will boost the numbers further.

"We have some very good friends in very high places who made this possible," Copeland said. "The National Endowment is extremely
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concerned about The Mount, and saving it."

"We are all over this," said board trustee Gordon Travers, who said he and the trustees are on the phone almost daily with each other and with Copeland.

Meanwhile, however, The Mount's prized collection of Edith Wharton's private library collection, purchased in 2005 for $2.5 million, could be in jeopardy.

British bookseller George Ramsden is owed $900,000 in connection with the book sale and did not receive his second scheduled payment last year. He holds a secured lien on the books and has sent a letter indicating he will reclaim them if The Mount cannot make good on its payments.

Copeland said she understood the letter was as "a pro forma" communication to secure Ramsden's rights, and was not immediately concerned. (Read the rest)

Mireille Giuliano on The House of Mirth

2008-03-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

From NPR.org:

In my early 20s, I "met" author Edith Wharton in a literature class while I was living in Paris and attending the Sorbonne. Right away, I felt I had a friend.

. . . .

I have read The House of Mirth half a dozen times, and I am always saddened to see Lily alone, without parents or friends she can trust. I am angered that she does not see the good friend and mate her friend Selden could be, just because he lacks a grand income. Why is this charming woman so bad at making decisions that are in her self-interest?

Lily wants happiness like all young adults starting out in life; she also wants a lot of money. So, she rejects some viable options, takes advice from the wrong people, and does not listen to her heart.

Part of Wharton's achievement is that she makes us care for Lily, who is trapped in her times but in herself as well. I respect Lily's integrity, drive, honesty and character, but I am angered and saddened by her materialism, her social game-playing and acquiescence to being an accessory or an ornament.

I want to reach out and advise and help her. I'd want Lily to learn about what one can control in life and what one cannot (like wanting it all and wanting it now). I'd like to change her values so that simplicity and quality over quantity rule her desires and needs.

I'd want Lily Bart to work on the magical "know thyself" so that she could truly learn from her mistakes and understand the meaning of inner versus outer beauty. I'd like her to understand the value of cultivating true friendship and love, and to find a joie de vivre where balance and happiness are the main ingredients to satisfy body and mind.

Discovering The House of Mirth helped me understand what I wanted from life. Most of all, the novel is a timeless guidebook to discovering the kind of values I've embraced. Rereading it now gives me added pleasures. Merci, Edith Wharton.

The Mount: Time Running Short for the Homestead of Edith Wharton

2008-02-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

The Mount: Time Running Short for the Homestead of Edith Wharton
By Alice Leccese Powers — February 28, 2008
Every time I venture near the Berkshires I intend to visit Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts.

[The Mount from the flower garden in Lenox, Mass.]
(Photo: David Dashiell/Wikimedia)

It was there that Wharton wrote her first book, The Decoration of Houses, about interior design and where she finished her novel, The House of Mirth.

Wharton designed The Mount, built in 1902, and put into practice many of the principles she espoused in The Decoration of Houses, including an enormous first floor gallery and a bedroom suite that accommodated her writing. As a Wharton fan, I’ve longed to see The Mount, especially as it has been substantially restored to Wharton’s original plans.

Now it may be too late.

Last week the Edith Wharton Restoration, The Mount’s administrative body, announced that the estate is in danger of foreclosure. It owes the bank $4.3 million and has defaulted on its $30,000 monthly payments. The foundation has to raise $3 million by March 24 or the estate will revert to the bank.

Ironically, the 35-room mansion has won awards for its preservation and attracts more than 30,000 visitors a year. What seems to have challenged its finances is the acquisition of Wharton’s 2,600-volume library from a British book collector. That coup cost $2.5 million and was supposed to be paid off in installments. However, the Edith Wharton Restoration has also defaulted on that debt.
(click here to read the rest)

From the Boston Globe about The Mount

2008-02-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

Wharton's house of worth

February 27, 2008

WEALTH and social position were major themes of Edith Wharton's famous novel "The House of Mirth." So it's a cruel irony that the Mount, the gracious home in Lenox where Wharton wrote the book, faces foreclosure.
more stories like this

Wharton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of over 40 books, designed the home and had it built in 1902. She called it her "first real home" and lived there for nearly a decade.

Now a museum, the Mount is facing a dire deadline. Unless the Edith Wharton Restoration, the nonprofit that owns the Mount, can raise $3 million by March 24, the bank will step in. These sad circumstances echo those of Lily Bart, the genteel heroine of "The House of Mirth," who also faced financial disaster as she struggled but failed to find her footing in the well-heeled heights of New York.

But life need not imitate art completely. The Edith Wharton Restoration is seeking donors to save the Mount. Small gifts can help show diverse support for the institution, and large gifts will provide badly needed stability. An anonymous donor is prepared to match the $3 million, creating a pool of $6 million. With this money, the organization could restructure its $4.3 million bank debt.

In part, the Mount is a victim of worthy ambitions. Restoring the home and the garden improved the site, but also drove up insurance and maintenance costs, according to the nonprofit's president, Stephanie Copeland. And using a private loan made by an individual, the organization spent £1.5 million (about $2.6 million at the time) to purchase Wharton's library from a British book dealer. It's an invaluable acquisition, but it added to the debt load - especially now that a sinking dollar has pushed up its annual payment. The organization has been able to start paying back this loan. Like other struggling homeowners, the Mount is also a victim of the economy. It has a mortgage with a fixed interest rate, but there's an adjustable interest rate on its $3 million line of credit. [Read the rest at the link.]

Message from Molly McFall at The Mount

2008-02-23T14:52:00.000-08:00

I write on behalf of Edith Wharton Restoration to thank you for posting this information. The situation is grave, but we are hopeful that we can still raise the funds necessary to prevent foreclosure. If anyone is able to help please visit http://www.edithwharton.org for details on how to contribute to the "Save The Mount" campaign. Thank you for your support, Molly McFall, Librarian, The Mount

The Mount in danger of foreclosure

2008-02-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times
Landmark Massachusetts Building Where Wharton Wrote Faces Foreclosure
By CHARLES McGRATH

Since 2002, Ms. Copeland explained by phone this week, the Mount, which is open to the public — much of it has been restored in recent years to match the period when Wharton lived there — has been covering its operating expenses by borrowing from the Berkshire Bank in nearby Pittsfield. It now owes the bank some $4.3 million, and in mid-February, when it failed to meet a scheduled monthly payment of $30,000, the bank sent a notice that it intended to start foreclosing unless the default was remedied promptly, Ms. Copeland said.

To stay open, she added, the Mount needs to raise $3 million by March 24. “The bank has really been very patient,” she explained. “They’re eager to help us work this out.”

If the Mount succeeds in raising that sum, Ms. Copeland said, an anonymous donor is waiting in the wings who has pledged to match it. The money could be used to help restructure the bank loan and to settle another outstanding debt, roughly $2.5 million, that the Mount incurred from a private lender in 2005 to buy Wharton’s 2,600-volume library from George Ramsden, a British book collector. The Mount also owes Mr. Ramsden roughly $885,000, to be paid off in nine yearly installments, and recently it defaulted on a scheduled payment to him, too.

“The situation is quite serious,” Sandra Boss, interim chairwoman of the Mount’s board, said in a telephone interview from London, where she works. “On the one hand, the Mount is winning awards for preservation and is internationally renowned as an institution. And it’s well run from an efficiency perspective. We’ve made great progress by cutting costs and raising revenues. On the other hand, our current debt levels are unserviceable and unsustainable. We’re not in control of our own destiny unless we can mount a restructuring of our debt.”

Edith Wharton's home at the Mount

2008-02-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times:

Inspiration Lives on Where Writers Dwelled
Photograph courtesy of the Edith Wharton Library

The library of Edith Wharton’s mansion in Lenox, Mass. Wharton was an expert on home décor.

By PAMELA REDMOND SATRAN
Published: February 22, 2008

. . . . . . . . .

Stowe wasn’t the only novelist with a sideline in shelter books: Edith Wharton, mistress of the fabulous mansion the Mount in Lenox, Mass., was an author of “The Decoration of Houses” as well as the author of “The House of Mirth.” Writers are often house-obsessed, maybe because bookish children who spend lots of time at home alone are most apt to become writers, which naturally keeps them home alone tweaking not only their sentences but also their paint colors. And because novel writing demands a sensitivity to setting and atmosphere, the person who spins out great characters and plots is also often capable of creating great rooms.

Roman Punch

2008-02-16T08:42:00.000-08:00

From the Wall Street Journal

An Icy Treat for Adults Only
By ERIC FELTEN
February 16, 2008; Page W9

William Maxwell Evarts was one of the most powerful lawyer-politicians of the 19th century. Lead counsel for Andrew Johnson, Evarts fought off the president's impeachment and soon found himself attorney general. Years later, in the disputed election of 1876, he lawyered Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House and was promptly named secretary of state. Yet Evarts wasn't powerful enough to get a drink at a state dinner. First Lady, and temperance advocate, "Lemonade" Lucy Hayes declared the White House would be dry. One night, leaving a presidential dinner, Evarts ran into a friend who asked him how the evening had gone: "Excellently," he said. "The water flowed like champagne."
[dRINKS]
ROMAN PUNCH

(Serves eight)
1 quart lemon ice
4-6 oz rum
4-6 oz brandy
1 oz orange curaçao or maraschino liqueur
8 oz champagne
• Blend all but champagne and freeze overnight. Just before serving, gently mix champagne into the spiked sherbet and serve in hollowed-out orange skins.

Journalist Benjamin Perley Poore recounted in his "Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis" that before the Hayeses came to town, "punch abounded everywhere, and the bibulous found Washington a rosy place." The bibulous were not to be denied, even by Lemonade Lucy, and came up with a way to hide the alcohol -- a spiked sherbet called Roman Punch. At White House functions, Poore recalled, the stewards served oranges that proved to be strangely popular with the guests. "Waiters were kept busy replenishing salvers upon which the tropical fruit lay . . . concealed within the oranges was a delicious frozen punch, a large ingredient of which was strong old Santa Croix rum."

. . . .
Among the requirements for a big, formal dinner in "Age of Innocence" New York were a hired chef and gilt-edged menu cards. But "the Roman punch made all the difference," Edith Wharton wrote in her great novel of high society. It wasn't that the punch was in and of itself so grand, but that it had "manifold implications" that extended well beyond the bill of fare -- "it signified either canvas-backs or terrapin, two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full décolletage with short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance."

To be unfamiliar with the icy treat was the mark of a bumpkin. Elizabeth Fries Ellet, in her 1869 book about Washington society, "The Court Circles of the Republic," tells of a "rustic pair invited by some accident" to a big bash during the administration of Andrew Jackson: "A tall, strapping Kentuckian had taken a saucer of frozen Roman punch, which he had never tasted before." He turned to his date and exclaimed, "I swar, Miss Jane, this beats julep all to nothing; who ever thought of chawing rum!"

Roman Punch was still going strong at one extravagant dinner given at a hotel in New York in the early years of the 20th century. According to the 1907 "Steward's Handbook," "Roman punch was served in oranges hanging on the natural trees, the pulp of the fruit having been deftly removed so that the favored guests could pick their own." But come the Jazz Age, the slushy drink was dismissed as an affectation of those trying just a bit too hard. "A dinner interlarded with a row of extra entrées, Roman punch, and hot dessert," Emily Post wrote in her original 1922 etiquette manual, "is unknown except at a public dinner, or in the dining-room of a parvenu."

Glimpses of the Moon Musical: Reviews

2008-01-30T06:39:00.000-08:00

From Variety:

Glimpses of the Moon
(Oak Room, Algonquin Hotel; 81 seats; $50 top)
By STEVEN SUSKIN

'Glimpses of the Moon'
Stephen Plunkett and Patti Murin both want to marry millionaires in 'Glimpses of the Moon,' a Jazz Age tuner at the Algonquin Hotel's Oak Room.
A Lemon Tree Prods. presentation of a musical in two acts with music by John Mercurio, book and lyrics by Tajlei Levis, based on the novel by Edith Wharton. Directed by Marc Bruni. Musical direction, John Mercurio. Choreography, Denis Jones.

Ellie Vanderlyn - Beth Glover
Nelson Vanderlyn - Daren Kelly
Ursula Gillow, Coral
Hicks - Laura Jordan
Winthrop Strefford - Glenn Peters
Susy Branch - Patti Murin
Nick Lansing - Stephen Plunkett
Guest Star - KT Sullivan

The Oak Room at the Algonquin has come up with a novel way to fill winter Monday nights; not a one-shot by an upcoming or faded cabaret singer, but a fully realized mini-musical comedy. "Glimpses of the Moon," from Edith Wharton's 1922 novel (which immediately followed her Pulitzer-winner, "The Age of Innocence"), fits reasonably well in the hallowed room and makes a pleasant evening's diversion.

Wharton's Jazz Age tale tells of a likable dancer-girl and novelist-boy, members of the underfed upper class who subsist from house-party to house-party. Their plan: to marry solely for the purpose of accumulating lavish wedding gifts from their gilt-edged friends, which they figure will bring enough at the pawn shop to get them through a year. They mutually agree to step aside as soon as one or the other finds a bona fide millionaire of their own, but you can pretty much guess what happens.

From Broadway World

It is always a pleasure to see a well-crafted, witty musical comedy. Glimpses of the Moon, an original musical based on an Edith Wharton novel and created specifically for the intimate wood-paneled Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, delivers in spades. Produced by Lemon Tree Productions and written by Tajlei Levis (book and lyrics) and John Mercurio (Music), it is a sparkling valentine to the jazz age.

It is 1922, and Susy Branch (Patti Murin) is a Bright Young Thing, who is popular but penniless, living off rich friends and being delightful, hoping to marry a rich man. At a party hosted by Ellie Vanderlyn (Beth Glover) and her husband Nelson (Daren Kelly), Susy meets the handsome Nick Lansing (Stephen Plunkett), a student of Greek pottery who is equally charming and impecunious. The two hatch a plot to marry each other and then sell off the wedding gifts over the course of a year, for once able to support themselves in the style to which they desperately want to become accustomed. After their honeymoon in a fishing camp owned by their well-connected but also basically poor friend Streffy (Glenn Peters), the two are invited to Ellie's mansion in Newport for the Summer, but when they arrive they find that Ellie is not there. She's off having an affair, and she's tasked Susy with mailing four letters to her husband over the course of the Summer to make him think she's still at home. This was brilliantly dramatized by the hilarious "Letters To Nelson", sung by Ellie getting more and more dishabille with each succeeding missive. Nick takes the time to write an archeological adventure novel (a precursor to Indiana Jones?).

CFP: Edith Wharton Panels at MLA 2008

2008-01-11T08:12:00.001-08:00

The Edith Wharton Society will sponsor two sessions at the MLA conference in San Francisco on December 27-30, 2008.

1. WWWD? What Would Wharton Do? Edith Wharton and Politics

What do we know about Edith Wharton’s politics? Her political persuasions? Her views on personal and institutional political responsibility in the modern world? What political concerns did she have? Was her writing ever meant to put forth any political thought, position, or agenda that she might feel important? What were her views on war? On the social problems facing the American public in the 1920s and 1930s? How applicable are her views to the current American scene? Please send abstracts (about 500 words) and short CV's by March 15th to Linda Costanzo Cahir (lcahir@kean.edu or Kean University, 1000 Morris Ave. Willis 103B, Union, NJ 07083).

2. Edith Wharton and the ‘Other Half’

This panel seeks to explore all aspects of Edith Wharton’s relationship to urban poverty. All approaches are welcome, as are papers connecting Wharton to other figures. Please send abstracts of 250-300 words and 1 page cvs to Hildegard Hoeller at hilhllr@aol.com by March 10th. This panel is organized by the Edith Wharton Society.

Edith Wharton Walk

2008-01-11T06:12:00.000-08:00

New York Times:

ADVENTURE ON A SHOESTRING Saturday at 2 p.m., “The World of Edith Wharton,” features a walk in Gramercy Park, meeting on the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 23rd Street. (212) 265-2663. $10.

Glimpses of the Moon Musical

2008-01-10T19:05:00.001-08:00

Full details at Wharton News and Notes.

Wharton's copyrights in "life plus 70 years" copyright countries

2008-01-01T18:53:00.000-08:00

From John Mark Ockerbloom of the Online Books page:

Much of the world gets to celebrate today as Public Domain Day as well, the day when a whole year’s worth of copyrights enter the public domain for anyone to copy or reuse as they like.

In countries that use the “life plus 50 years” minimum standard of the Berne Convention, works by authors who died in 1957 enter the public domain today. That includes writers, artists, and composers like Nikos Kazantzakis, Diego Rivera, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jean Sibelius, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

In countries that use the “life plus 70 years” term, works by authors who died in 1937 enter the public domain, including works by J. M. Barrie, Jean de Brunhoff, H. P. Lovecraft, Maurice Ravel, and Edith Wharton. Since many countries with this term recently extended it due to trade agreements, they’re often seeing these works re-enter the public domain after being removed from it, but their return to the public is still appreciated.

Wharton's Mount is returning to form

2007-12-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

From Boston.com

Wharton's Mount is returning to form
By Sacha Pfeiffer
Globe Staff / December 26, 2007

LENOX - By 1997, the palatial estate built nearly a century earlier in this upscale country town by wealthy novelist Edith Wharton had fallen into disrepair.

The terrace that encircled the 25-room European-style house was on the verge of collapse. Chunks of stucco had broken off the exterior. The windows were riddled with rot.

"The building was in very sad shape," said Stephanie Copeland, president of Edith Wharton Restoration, a nonprofit group formed to rescue the 48-acre property from disintegration. "It was clear that we were either going to restore it or we were going to lose it."

Intent on returning the home, called The Mount, to its original grandeur, the group launched an ambitious and costly renovation project. Preserving the building was important, it believed, because although Wharton is best known for her more than 40 books, she was also an accomplished interior designer and gardener - and the Mount's handsome decor and elaborate landscaping were a testament to that.

Wharton's most famous works include "The House of Mirth" and "The Age of Innocence," which won her a Pulitzer Prize. But her first book was "The Decoration of Houses," an 1897 guide to interior design. In it, she expounded on her belief that a home should embody the principles of proportion, harmony, simplicity, and suitability. Seven years later, influenced by her frequent European travels, she published "Italian Villas and Their Gardens," in which she wrote that gardens should be divided into rooms and should blend into the natural landscape.

"Wharton was not only one of our greatest writers, she was also a major contributor to the field of interior design, architecture, and landscape gardening," Copeland said. "This is an area that's very unappreciated about her."

The Mount became Wharton's design laboratory, a place where she could put her theories into practice. Her 16,000-square-foot house, for example, was built on a hillside to take advantage of its sweeping views of the Berkshire Hills and nearby Laurel Lake. Its main rooms overlooked three acres of formal gardens, which incorporated grass terraces, stone walls, and a crushed marble walk, reflecting English, French, and Italian styles.

And its entrance hall had double glass doors that kept visitors out of the main house unless Wharton was home to welcome them. "While the main purpose of a door is to admit," she wrote in "The Decoration of Houses," "its secondary purpose is to exclude."

(continue reading the article at Boston.com)

Lamb House

2007-12-11T08:09:00.000-08:00

From the Times Online.

You might think a yearly rental fee of £11,500 for the grand Georgian former home of Henry James in Rye, East Sussex, is something of a bargain – but tenancy of Grade II*-listed Lamb House isn’t simply a matter of reclining in the oak-panelled parlour and contemplating the American-born writer’s work.

Living there means taking on responsibilities that include greeting at least 7,000 members of the general public a year, on two afternoons a week between March and October – James fans descend on the house, at the top of cobbled West Street, in droves – as well as taking the entrance money and keeping records of visitor numbers. You’ll also need to be well acquainted with the writer’s life and works: many of your visitors will be James scholars from across the Atlantic.

The four-storey, brick-fronted five-bedroom house was donated to the National Trust in 1948 by the widow of James’s nephew and heir, “as a symbol of ties that unite the British and American peoples”, and became part of the trust’s long-term tenancy scheme. The most recent occupants, Sarah Philo, 30, and her boyfriend, John Senior, 59, both educational writers, moved out two weeks ago, and it is now in need of tenants.

. . .

In the oak-panelled parlour, you can stand on the rug that Edith Wharton – James’s dazzling protégée, who later outstripped him in popularity – once trod, and admire his library of first editions.

Lily Bart's Death: Suicide or Accident?

2007-11-21T09:34:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times
"Wharton Letter Reopens a Mystery" by Charles McGrath

Literary biography is never finished, Hermione Lee, the Goldsmiths’ professor of English at Oxford and author of acclaimed books about Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, said the other day. New information keeps turning up. In the case of Wharton, what has just turned up is a letter that casts new light on the vexing question of what exactly happens at the end of her 1905 novel, “The House of Mirth.” Does Lily Bart, the novel’s heroine, kill herself or die of an accidental overdose?

The text is ambiguous. Lily, honorable but not always smart in her decisions, has so fallen from her perch in New York society that she is living in a boarding house, and so broke that she needs to work for a living. She has quit one job, as secretary to a tasteless social climber, and has failed miserably at another, sewing for the fashionable milliner Mme. Regina, and to get through the nights has become addicted to chloral hydrate.

On the evening of her death, lonely and depressed, a step away from prostitution, she packs away her few remaining gowns and carefully settles her accounts, writing a check that will clear her last remaining debt, and then deliberately takes a larger dose than usual.

“The action of the drug was incalculable,” she tells herself, “and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed. “

Some critics have argued that the suggestion of mere risk-taking here, and not intentional overdosing, is simply a euphemism of the kind frequently employed in Lily’s world, where well-bred people never referred to suicide. In an e-mail message the novelist Roxanna Robinson, author of the introduction to the new Wharton anthology, “New York Stories,” said, “I think the reader knows on some deep level that the event was deliberate, that Lily Bart knew she’d exhausted her possibilities, and knew that going on would mean a life of unbearable ignobility.”

Ms. Robinson added, “If she doesn’t take action here, if her death occurs by chance (or if Anna Karenina had fallen under the wheels by mistake), the tragedy is drained of much of its power.”

Others have argued that it is precisely the careless, accidental nature of Lily’s death that is so tragic, because carelessness, a failure to think things through, is her great flaw, while her great strength is an ability to bounce back. Had she only lived through the night, according to this view, she might have married Lawrence Selden, her soul mate, and reclaimed her place in society.

The newly revealed letter, written by Wharton herself, seems to point to the suicide theory. It is dated Dec. 26, 1904, or just a month before “The House of Mirth” began appearing in monthly installments in Scribner’s Magazine, and is addressed to Dr. Francis Kinnicutt, a well-known society doctor who specialized in the mental ailments of the well-to-do. At the time of the letter, in fact, he was treating Wharton’s manic-depressive husband, Teddy, who was beginning to behave in ways — eventually embezzling her money, setting up a mistress in Boston — that would lead to the dissolution of their marriage.

The letter begins by resorting to the timeless disguise of the advice-seeker. “A friend of mine has made up her mind to commit suicide,” Wharton writes, “& has asked me to find out ... the most painless & least unpleasant method of effacing herself.”

Only on the second page does Wharton reveal that her “friend” is in fact a fictional character appearing in the pages of Scribner’s, explaining, “I have heroine to get rid of, and want some points on the best way of disposing of her.” Later she asks: “What soporific, or nerve-calming drug, would a nervous and worried young lady in the smart set be likely to take to, & what would be its effects if deliberately taken with the intent to kill herself? I mean, how would she feel and look toward the end?”

The letter was found stuck into a first-edition copy of “The House of Mirth,” along with a poem, dated 1906, by someone apparently besotted with Lily Bart. Stephanie Copeland, the president of the Mount, Wharton’s house in Lenox, Mass., which has been restored and turned into a museum, has speculated that the poet must have been a friend of Dr. Kinnicutt.

. . . .
Ms. Lee, who was shown the letter by Ms. Copeland, said earlier this week: “One of the things that’s so interesting is the reference to serialization. We think of Wharton as a 20th-century novelist, a master of form, and here she is writing like Dickens or Thackeray. The book is about to start coming out, and she hasn’t finished it yet. The other great thing is what the letter suggests about her practical meticulousness, the way she wants to get things right — her literary pragmatism, you could say.”

She added, “Does the letter prove that all along Lily intended to kill herself? I think it’s quite likely that in December 1904, Wharton was thinking that Lily was going to commit suicide, and that by the time she came to the ending, months later, she changed her mind, because of the way those last pages hold onto so many moral positions at once. I think that, as she went on, she decided that it would be more effective if she left the ending ambiguous. It’s actually a much greater book if we don’t know for sure.”

Another person who has seen the letter is the 90-year-old novelist Louis Auchincloss, who may have more Whartonian connections than anyone still alive. His grandmother knew Edith Wharton in Newport, R.I. His parents were good friends of Freddy and Le Roy King, New York lawyers who were Wharton’s executors and also, in her later career, when she was living in France, her advisers about contemporary American diction.

“They were the least American gentlemen I’ve ever met,” Mr. Auchincloss said recently. “That’s why in her late novels you get dialogue like ‘By Jove, I’ve had a beastly, fagging sort of day.’”

Mr. Auchincloss is himself the author of a Wharton biography, a book so fond and intimate that it sometimes reads as if he had known her. “While I was writing it, I sometimes thought I did,” he said, and then declared his position on “The House of Mirth” to be unchanged by the letter.

Taking down his own first edition, he read the concluding pages aloud in his Brahmin accent, and said: “I don’t see what the fuss is about. It’s perfectly clear what happens. Lily doesn’t mean to kill herself but risks death in a desperate bid for rest. Edith Wharton wrote to Kinnicutt because she needed to find a drug that wouldn’t disfigure Lily’s beautiful body. She didn’t want that dreadful Mme Bovary thing, with the arsenic. I mean, how can you have Lily Bart die a messy death?”

Click on this link to go to the full article.

Glimpses of the Moon, a new musical adaptation

2007-11-18T11:22:00.001-08:00

We invite members of the Edith Wharton Society and friends to attend the world premiere of the new musical adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1922 novel, GLIMPSES OF THE MOON. This sparkling Jazz Age musical will be presented at the famed Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan on Monday evenings, starting on Jan 14, 2008 .

Glimpses of the Moon is one of Wharton's rare comedies, though not without its share of heartaches. Popular but penniless, Suzy Branch and her friend Nick Lansing devise the ultimate fund-raising scheme: to marry and live off the wedding gifts while they help each to find suitable millionaires. The plan works perfectly-- until they fall in love.

This new adaptation written by Tajlei Levis & John Mercurio, and directed by Marc Bruni, features a cast of six actors, three musicians and special guest appearances by popular cabaret artists. Marc Bruni is currently the Associate Director of Legally Blonde and Grease on Broadway.

Levis and Mercurio previously collaborated on an adaptation of Dawn Powell's 1942 novel A Time to be Born, which had a sold-out run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. The New York Times called that production "an elegant adaptation…full of catty wit and jitterbugging. The jazzy score - full of catchy numbers - made the running time fly by." Composer John Mercurio is a Jonathan Larson award winner whose musical Diva Diaries played to packed houses at the Broward and Tampa Bay Performing Arts Centers and the Lakeshore Theatre in Chicago.

Shows are at 8pm Monday evenings, January 14- March 3, 2008.

The Algonquin Hotel is located at 59 West 44th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenue, in Manhattan.
For reservations, please call the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel at 212-419-9331 or email GlimpsesMusical @ Gmail dot com.

Public Lecture (from The New Yorker)

2007-11-11T20:26:00.001-08:00

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12 at 6PM
Tenement Museum Shop, 108 Orchard Street

EDITH WHARTON’S NEW YORK
How the OTHER Other Half Lives

Learn how New York City shaped novelist Edith Wharton’s writing. Join us for a panel discussion with Wharton scholar
Hildegard Hoeller and Roxana Robinson, editor of the new collection The New York Stories of Edith Wharton.

About the panelists:

Hildegard Hoeller is associate professor of English at the City University of New York, where she teaches 19th and early twentieth century American literature. She is the current president of the Edith Wharton society and has worked on Wharton since the late 1980s. Her first book, Edith Wharton's Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction (2000), focused on Wharton's response to these literary traditions.

Roxana Robinson is the author of three novels, three short story collections, and a biography. She has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, Vogue, and many other publications. She is a trustee emeritus of American PEN and currently teaches at the New School. Newsweek has compared her fiction to that of Edith Wharton’s.

DETAILS:
F to Delancey; B/D to Grand
212-982-8420
HYPERLINK "mailto:bookclub@tenement.org"bookclub@tenement.org
FREE and open to the public

Call for Papers: Wharton Sessions at ALA 2008

2007-10-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

CFP, American Literature Association, May 2008

1. Edith Wharton and the Culture of Celebrity.

Wharton’s treatment of literary, musical, and theatrical celebrity; fans, obsessive and otherwise; the meanings of stardom and fame in Wharton’s fiction; being in and out of the spotlight. All approaches welcome; papers on Wharton’s lesser-known works would be especially appreciated. Please send 1-page abstracts and brief c.v.’s to Meredith Goldsmith (mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) by January 15, 2008.

2. Representations of Wharton in the Mass Media

How has Wharton been represented, both during and after her lifetime, in the mass media (including, but not limited to, reviews, visual images, advertisements, obituaries, fictional texts, architectural and design texts, newspapers, magazines, film, radio, television, tourist and historical site brochures, internet sites, and so forth). What aspects of Wharton’s life, identity, or career are privileged or omitted in these texts and for what purpose? What is the relationship between the persona constructed in these texts and the private and public persona that Wharton herself constructed? What is the relationship between Wharton’s mass media representation and her fiction? All approaches are welcome. Please send a 1-page abstract and brief c.v. to Gary Totten (gary.totten@ndsu.edu) by January 15, 2008.

Caldwell, N.J. "Big Read" Event

2007-09-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

From the Star-Ledger:

Actors bring a literary classic to life in Caldwell
'Age of Innocence' reading at high school
Friday, September 21, 2007
BY ELIZABETH MOORE
Star-Ledger Staff

A spellbound audience listened to the conversation between the illicit lovers -- there was anticipation, an argument, a stolen kiss, and finally tears.

The audience was made up of English students from James Caldwell High School and Mount Saint Dominic Academy and the lovers were really professional actors who had volunteered their time to bring the Edith Wharton classic "The Age of Innocence" to life.

Alysia Reiner and David Alan Basche, a married couple with film and Broadway experience, took to the stage Wednesday at Caldwell High School to read aloud Chapter 29 of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel, the scene where Newland Archer meets his wife's cousin Madame Olenska at the train station.

In the novel, Archer is married, but in love with his wife's cousin. [more at the link]

Scorsese's _Age of Innocence_ Score on NPR

2007-09-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

Interview with Elmer Bernstein, composer of the score for Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, is available at NPR:
http://composersdatebook.publicradio.org/listings/datebook_20070910.shtml.
--Submitted by Julie Olin-Ammentorp