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The Edith Wharton Society now has a site that allows posting to the first page, so Edith Wharton in the News and any News and Notes will now be at our new site,

http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org

Since it's a Wordpress site, you can sign up for email updates or follow the site, if you like. The old content will remain at this site.

Please change your bookmarks to this new site, and thanks.

Edith Wharton Society News

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AWARD WINNERS

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Congratulations to the Edith Wharton Essay Prize winners:

Both essays will be published in the _EWR_, vol 29.2:

First prize: Krystyna Michael (PhD candidate, CUNY-Grad Center)“A Break in the Continuity:” Chaos, Control and Wharton’s Commitment to Form:

Second prize: Katelyn Durkin (PhD candidate, UVa):The (Re)Production Craze: Taylorism and Regress in Edith Wharton’s Twilight Sleep

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QUERIES

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The following queries will be posted to the Wharton Society site. If you have any information, please reply to the list or to whartonqueries@gmail.com

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Hello:

I'm an author specializing in the history of espionage. I'm currently working on a project that has somehow taken me a bit far afield. I'm trying to track down the story that Edith Wharton intervened for Maj. Ralph Van Deman in his efforts to establish a military intelligence division during World War I. 

Denman's memoirs mention a "lady authoress" who traveled in the same social circles as the Secretary of War, Baker, but offer no other details. 

I was hoping that perhaps she might have made mention of Maj. Deman or Baker in her diaries.  The date would have been around 1917, just prior to America's entrance into WWI. 

Needless to say, any assistance you might be able to provide would be greatly appreciated. 

Best Regards,

Henry R. Schlesinger

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Dear EW Community:

I thank you in advance for your help,

Meg

{It is fine to list my information.}

Margaret Toth, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English margaret.toth@manhattan.edu www.manhattan.edu

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MINUTES

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Minutes for the ALA 2013 Business Meeting: http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/alamin5-24-13.htm

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EDITH WHARTON REVIEW

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New Volume of The Edith Wharton Review 

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

Volume 29.1, Spring 2013

Teaching Cluster--Guest Editor, Gary Totten

Singley, Carol. "Change at Stake: Teaching Edith Wharton's Late Fiction." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 1-7.

Goldsmith, Meredith. "Twilight Sleep and The Children: Approaching Wharton's Late Novesl in the Undergraduate Classroom." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 7-11.

Kornasky, Linda. "Edith Wharton's The Glimpses of the Moon meets Geoffrey Miller's Spent." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 11-20.

Wentzel, Rocki. "Classical Reception in Edith Wharton's Late Fiction." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 20-32.

Saunders, Judith. "Unwritten Masterpieces." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 32.

Coit, Emily. Rev. of Edith Wharton in Context, ed. Laura Rattray. Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 33-34.

Dawson, Melanie. "Edith Wharton Collection Research Report." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 34-35.

Wierzbicki, Kaye. "Edith Wharton Society Mount Research Award." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 33-37.

Goldman-Price, Irene. "From the Archives: Two Letters from Harry Jones to Anna Foster about Wharton's Near-Fatal Illness." Edith Wharton Review 29.1 (Spring 2013): 37-39.

Edith Wharton Symposium Registration Open

Please note that online registration is now open for the Edith Wharton symposium taking place in Liverpool from 22 -23 August 2013. Everyone welcome! 

To register, please go to the site www.hope.ac.uk/custom and click the booking tab.

Dr. Laura Rattray

Edith Wharton Panels at ALA 2013

Edith Wharton Panels at ALA 2013

Friday May 24, 2013 8:10 – 9:30 am

Session 7-A Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism (Essex North East 3rd Floor)

Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Emily Orlando, Fairfield University

1. “Edith Wharton’s Old New York: The Autobiography of an Expatriate,” Hildegard Hoeller, CUNY-CSI and the Graduate Center

2. “‘she was learning how to make hats’: Negotiating New York City in The House of Mirth and Free Food for Millionaires,” Johanna X. K. Garvey, Fairfield University

3. “‘I want a girl who doesn’t know what a Duke is’: The Buccaneers and Models of Cosmopolitan Thought,” Melanie Dawson, College of William and Mary

4. “Contexts Engendering Texts: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Francesca Segal’s The Innocents,” Ferdâ Asya, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

Friday May 24, 2013 9:40 – 11:00 am

Session 8-F Undine at 100: A Centennial Reappraisal of The Custom of the Country (Defender 7thFloor)

Organized by the Edith Wharton Society

Chair: Cecilia Macheski, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

1. “A Novel for All Seasons,” Susan Goodman, University of Delaware

2. “Gate-Crasher par excellence: Undine and the 'Aborigines' in The Custom of the Country,” Maureen E. Montgomery, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

3. “Finding Undine: Narrative Sources and Strategies for The Custom of the Country,” Laura Rattray, University of Glasgow

4. “Technologies of Information: Gossip, Self-Revelation, and Social Media in Wharton'sThe Custom of the Country,” Gary Totten, North Dakota State University



Session 10-P Business Meeting: Edith Wharton Society (Baltic 7th Floor)

Edith Wharton Symposium

Edith Wharton Symposium, Liverpool Hope University 22-23 August 2013

We’re delighted to confirm that the keynote speakers for this event will be Pamela Knights and Gary Totten.  Both, of course, are terrific Wharton scholars and speakers: Gary, the immediate past president of the Society and editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture, while Pam, who has published very extensively on Wharton, is perhaps best known as the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (bios below). We very much look forward to their keynotes.

If you would like further information on the symposium, please contact us at: custom@hope.ac.uk or Laura.Rattray@glasgow.ac.uk

Best wishes,

Laura and Bill

 Pamela Knights is Honorary Senior Lecturer at Durham University. She is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (2009), and co-author of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2006). Other publications on Wharton include chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (1995), Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: A Reassessment (2010), “This Strange Dream upon the Water”: Venice and the Cultural Imagination (2012), and Edith Wharton in Context (2012). She has also written introductions to editions of The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, and is currently working on a new monograph for Palgrave Macmillan.

Gary Totten is Professor of English at North Dakota State University and immediate past president of the Edith Wharton Society.  He is the editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (2007) and a special issue of the Edith Wharton Review on “Teaching Wharton’s Late Fiction” (forthcoming Spring 2013).  He is the author of essays on Wharton in various journals, including Twentieth Century Literature, Journal of the Short Story in English, Pedagogy, Studies in American Naturalism, Studies in Travel Writing, College Literature, and the essay collection, Edith Wharton in Context.  He is currently researching The Custom of the Country and Dakota divorce culture, funded by a Beinecke Research Award from the Edith Wharton Society and a Gunlogson Fund Award from North Dakota State University’s Institute for Regional Studies.

Beinecke Award and The Mount Award Winners

Gary Totten, Professor of English, North Dakota State University: “Wharton’s Wild West:Undine Spragg, Medora de Mores, and Dakota Divorce Culture”

Sheila Liming, Ph D candidate, English, Carnegie Mellon University: “Edith Wharton and Modern Economies of Book Ownership”

CFP: Edith Wharton at SAMLA

"The Transatlantic Writer: Edith Wharton, Text, and Travel"
Edith Wharton Society Session at South Atlantic MLA (SAMLA) 2012 (Research Triangle Park, Durham, North Carolina, November 9-11, 2012)

The Edith Wharton Society invites papers that engage with this year’s South Atlantic MLA (SAMLA) conference theme: "Text as Memoir: Tales of Travel, Immigration, and Exile." We welcome a range of responses to this topic, including examinations of her travel writings, other non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.

Please send your 300-500 word abstract and a one-page CV as email attachments by 12 May 2012 to Mary Carney at mcarney@gsc.edu.

The 2012 SAMLA conference will be in Research Triangle Park, Durham, North Carolina, November 9-11, 2012. For more information on SAMLA, visit http://samla.gsu.edu/convention/convention.htm

Edith Wharton's pronouns: just right

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-03/analysis-1000-books-finds-men-show-three-times-more-often-women-infographic

Plutarch was practically the worst, Edith Wharton was right on, and Shakespeare was about average.

That's all in terms of the balance of pronouns they used in their writing. Plutarch used nearly 16 masculine pronouns for every feminine one in his books, while Shakespeare had a 3:1 ratio of pronouns. Edith Wharton's books, on the other hand, talked about men and women in nearly equal measure.

CFP: Edith Wharton and The Custom of the Country: Centennial Reappraisals

Edith Wharton and The Custom of the Country: Centennial Reappraisals

Symposium: 22 and 23 August 2013, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Symposium Directors: William Blazek (Liverpool Hope University) and Laura Rattray (University of Glasgow)

Call for Papers:

2013 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Edith Wharton’s much-read and much-analyzed novel The Custom of the Country. Described as the writer’s "greatest book" by Hermione Lee in her 2007 biography, and listed by Wharton herself at the end of a long and prolific career as one of her own favourite works, The Custom of the Country arguably remains the author's most complex and controversial novel.

To mark its centenary year, the symposium directors warmly invite papers on any topic pertaining to this landmark text. Themes might include: re-readings of the novel in the light of modern economic crises, serialisation, marketing and material culture, narrative strategies, modernist aesthetics, the challenges and rewards of teaching the novel, and reappraisals of Wharton’s most controversial female protagonist, Undine Spragg. Alternatively, discussions might be framed within the contexts of leisure-class marriage and divorce, masculinity, Europe, travel, or the visual arts. We also welcome broader comparative approaches, viewing The Custom of the Country in relation to other novels of the period, to other work by Wharton in any genre, or exploring the novel’s influence on contemporary writers and popular culture.

Co-sponsored by the Edith Wharton Society, the symposium will be held on the Hope Park campus of Liverpool Hope University, located within five miles of the Liverpool city centre. Moderately priced, ensuite campus accommodation will be available to delegates for the duration of the symposium. Day rates are also available. Keynote speakers for this event will be confirmed shortly. Further information and updates can be found on the symposium website: www.hope.ac.uk/custom

Please send 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers (indicating any equipment/technical requirements), and a brief biographical note by the deadline of 15 April 2013 to the directors via e-mail: custom@hope.ac.uk

Sponsors: Liverpool Hope University and the Edith Wharton Society

Edith Wharton by Design

From http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/01/24/edith-wharton-by-design/

People who live in New York might agree that there is very little reason to find yourself between Fourteenth and Forty-Second Streets unless you absolutely have to. Go past Union Square, and you’re liable to bump into everything from confused tourists to people selling knockoff Louis Vuitton and Fendi bags worse than the ones you can purchase on Canal Street in Chinatown. The twenties into the thirties can look like a never-ending row of scaffolding at certain stretches, with C-grade delis and fast food chains hidden beneath, leading you finally to the terrifyingly bright lights of Times Square.

For the better part of the decade in which I’ve lived in New York, this experience is probably what has kept me from the middle of the city. But when I moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan, and started taking daily walks up the various avenues from the West Village to an office on Twenty-Eighth,  I began to learn the history of certain buildings I passed along my way: admiring the townhouse at 28 E. Twentieth Street where President Theodore Roosevelt was born; the splendor and history of Gramercy Park; the row of buildings in the Flower District that seems unremarkable, until you realize that this block of Twenty-Eighth between Fifth and Sixth was once known as Tin Pan Alley, and filled the American Songbook. With each block, the twenties became more and more magical, especially on the days when I managed to avoid the crowds scuttling down the sidewalks—those less hectic New York days when I could look up and admire the various gargoyles and the golden dome of the Sohmer Piano Building. The architecture of the twenties distracted me from my daily grind, but it was on an evening trip to the grocery store that the area I once shunned suddenly took on an entirely new meaning. That night I noticed the red plaque on a doorway next to a Starbucks at 14 W. Twenty-Third Street that read, “This was the childhood home of Edith Jones Wharton, one of America’s most important authors.”

Julian Fellowes visits The Mount

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/local/ci_21919060/screenwriter-wharton-award-winner-visits-mounthttp://www.berkshireeagle.com/local/ci_21919060/screenwriter-wharton-award-winner-visits-mount

Fellowes, who lives just outside of London, will receive the 2012 Edith Wharton Lifetime Achievement Award in Boston today, but he extended his first trip to Massachusetts by one day to have time to visit The Mount for the first time

"You come to get more of a handle on someone," Fellowes told The Eagle. "Just reading their work doesn't give you that sort of modesty."

During a tour of The Mount guided by Executive Director Susan Wissler, Fellowes admired the extra space in the house, the minute details in the architecture, and even took extra notice of the servant quarters. Servants are featured prominently in "Downton Abbey."

Several times during the tour, Fellowes

said "The essence of luxury is wasted space," according to Rebecka McDougall, The Mount's marketing and communications director.

"He was so charming and knowledgeable," Wissler said. "It's another star in the sky that celebrates Wharton's 250th birthday."

The estate is a "survivor," according to Fellowes, because it's managed to stick around even though it's weathered previous generations that weren't as keen on historical preservation.

Fellowes kept Wharton's library, full of reporters, photographers, and estate officials laughing with the same cheeky wit often found in some of his other popular screenplays like "Gosford Park," "Vanity Fair," "The Young Victoria" and "The Tourist."

While sitting in the library among books annotated by Wharton herself, Fellowes referenced "The House of Mirth" and "The Custom of the Country" several times. He became acquainted with her work on his own, and wasn't taught it in school, he said.

"She had the ability to judge the society from which she came from, but not condemn it," Fellowes said. "It's simply an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of society."

Buccaneers

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/my-week-marilyn-director-talks-377282?google_editors_picks=true

BBC Films and Ruby Films are producing the adaptation of what was Edith Wharton's last novel, unfinished at the time of her death.

Simon Curtis, who most recently directedMy Week With Marilyn, is in talks to helmThe Buccaneers, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s high-society novel being produced by BBC Films and Ruby Films.

Buccaneers was Wharton’s last novel and unfinished when she died in 1937. Wharton scholar Marion Mainwaring completed the book in 1993. In the mid-'90s, BBC produced a miniseries adaptation and had the screenwriter come up with yet another ending.

Edith Wharton in Vogue

http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/the-custom-of-the-country-edith-wharton-estate-in-the-berkshires/#1

On a slope overlooking the dark waters and densely wooded shores of Laurel Lake we built a spacious and dignified house,” Edith Wharton wrote about The Mount, the estate which she created in the early years of the twentieth century in Lenox, Massachusetts. Among those in her inner circle who came to stay—President Theodore Roosevelt, diplomat Walter Berry, and sculptor Daniel Chester French, whose studio, Chesterwood, was nearby—was her spacious and dignified friend Henry James, who, writing to a mutual friend, described it as “a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.”

Read our behind-the-scenes interviews with the actors, artists, and writers who brought to life Edith Wharton's world in Vogue.

Wharton planned each detail of the interior and the gardens with meticulous care, bossing architects (including Ogden Codman, Jr., to whom she became close), designers, and gardeners with her customary firmness. She had strong opinions on the subject: In 1897, she’d written, with Codman, Jr., the classic text The Decoration of Houses; and her 1904 book,Italian Villas and Their Gardens, illustrated by her friend, the painter Maxfield Parrish, would become an influential treatise on garden design. All the rooms on the main floor opened onto a long gallery with a vaulted ceiling and Italian furniture. The servants’ wing had a hydraulic elevator. While the house was filled with European influences inspired by her travels in France, Italy, and England, Wharton also integrated features of the American colonial style, including green shutters on all the windows and a striped awning over the center of the terrace. 

Occupying more than 100 acres, the property included a drive lined with sugar maple trees, an English-style meadow, an American suburban lawn, gravel walks, an elaborate rock garden, fountains, and terraces with views over the lake. There was also a kitchen garden (designed by Wharton’s niece, Beatrix Farrand) and a working farm. Wharton lived in the house in the summer and fall between 1903 and 1908, all the time overseeing improvements and fresh plantings. “Really,” she wrote, “it looks, for a fleeting moment, like a garden in some civilized climate.” At The Mount, she could also indulge her passion for dogs, among them Toto, Miza, and Jules, all eventually buried in a graveyard on the grounds. 

Since her marriage to Teddy Wharton was deteriorating, she arranged for herself and her husband to have separate but adjoining bedrooms, and since her priority was privacy and work, she created a suite of rooms for herself alone, including a space where she could write in peace, even when she had guests. The money was hers, which gave her freedom in her marriage. Most of it was inherited, but she also earned from her books, and made a great deal more once she could sell film rights. During all of the years except one when she lived at The Mount, patiently assisted by her German tutor turned literary secretary, Anna Bahlmann, she published at least one new book a year—a novel, a collection of stories, or travel sketches.

NY Times Review of Jennie Fields's THE AGE OF DESIRE

Edith Wharton’s Awakening

‘The Age of Desire,’ by Jennie Fields

By JUDITH MARTIN

Published: August 31, 2012

It is impossible to libel the dead; legal protection of reputation stops at the grave. But is it possible to embarrass the dead?

Stern Collection/Bettmann-Corbis

Edith Wharton, circa 1877.

THE AGE OF DESIRE

By Jennie Fields

352 pp. Pamela Dorman Books/Viking. $27.95.

Modern writers keep trying. If anyone would have been humiliated by having his sexuality, or lack of it, explored in serious literature, it would have been Henry James. Fears of posthumous invasions of his privacy led him to a frenzy of letter burning, but the reams that he missed were enough to inspire such speculation by the critic Leon Edel and the novelist Colm Toibin, among many others.

There is no need to speculate about the personal life of Henry James’s friend Edith Wharton, the subject of Jennie Fields’s novel “The Age of Desire.” Wharton’s wild affair, in middle age, with the American expatiate journalist Morton Fullerton — wild on her part, that is, but routine on his — is well documented in the passionate and pathetic letters she wrote to him. Despite her pleas to return them, as a gentleman was obliged to do when a love affair ended, Fullerton, well known as a serial cad to assorted besotted ladies and gentlemen, kept and eventually sold letters from both Edith Wharton and Henry James.

There could hardly be a more apt theme for a novel of manners than the struggle of a prominent and respectable lady to disguise her inflamed feelings in order to meet the conventions of society. It is not only her frantic yearning for her lover that is portrayed here, but the fallout expressed in her irritation with her husband and her editorial assistant for unknowingly getting in the way.

A secondary novel-of-manners theme, developed from the author’s research, concerns the relationship between Wharton and Anna Bahlmann, her childhood governess, who became her editorial assistant. With no clear social definition covering such a development, the women vacillate between behaving as friends and colleagues or as mistress and servant.

Authentic letters are quoted to bolster the pitiful way in which Wharton was reduced to writing like a lovesick teenager, snapping “Don’t write me again!” in her anger that Fullerton had, in fact, not written, and a week later pleading that he should have known she didn’t mean it. Bahlmann’s letters pointedly ignore the slights she suffered, as if acknowledging she was in no position to complain. There are credible scenes dramatizing the resulting volatile behavior.

The flaw in this otherwise interesting novel is that its title, mimicking Edith Wharton’s own title, “The Age of Innocence,” presupposes an understanding not just of these personal lives but of the times in which they were lived. Wharton’s novels, including those set in later periods like “The Children” and “The Mother’s Recompense,” are rich with examples of conventions in flux as they symbolize evolving social attitudes. Fields’s novel is rife with examples that are anachronistic and therefore misleading. By the time Edith Wharton’s posthumous love letters were published in the 1980s, it would not be terminally embarrassing for a lady in a dissolving marriage to have a lover. But it’s safe to say that this particular lady would have been embarrassed to see herself and the Parisian society she enjoyed inadvertently portrayed as ignorant and provincial.

The novel’s opening scene takes place in 1907 at an intellectual French salon where, in what passes for arch conversation, the poet Anna de Noailles demands, “Why do they never give the Nobel Prize to a woman?” Someone counters that one had been awarded the peace prize (that would be Bertha von Suttner in 1905). It’s left to the frustrated reader to shout “Marie Curie!” at this supposed hotbed of Parisian sophistication, where no one seems to know that a female 1903 physics winner is toiling in a nearby suburb, on her way to winning her second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry.

Read the rest at

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/books/review/the-age-of-desire-by-jennie-fields.html?pagewanted=all

Wall Street Journal: "A Tuscan Garden Tutorial"

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By CHARLOTTE MOSS

IN HER 1904 BOOK "Italian Villas and Their Gardens," Edith Wharton wrote that the reader should not "content himself with a vague enjoyment of old Italian gardens, but…extract from them principles which may be applied to home." Wise counsel. Many of the villa gardens of Italy appear grand and out of reach but they offer lessons that can be useful and scalable. The Italian-style walled garden at the Mount, Wharton's home in Lenox, Mass., is a prime example of one of these translations.

An avid motorist, Wharton put her Mercedes through some rigorous road tests while touring in France and Italy with Henry James and others. "Italian Villas" details the architecture and ornament of the gardens she encountered and how they flowed into the landscape. While I read the book years ago, it remains a steady reference for me and was once again pulled out in planning my Tuscany trip this summer.

Italian gardens are characterized by a dominance of manicured green, statuary and water features that often involve stone cascades and ciottolato (mosaic stonework). Villa gardens have a balance of cultivated greenery and natural forest, known as boscoor boschetto, depending on the scale of the villa itself. Architects responsible for hallmarks of the Italian landscape, from the Renaissance through the 20th century, include Cecil Pinsent, Luigi de Cambray Digny, Gaetano Baccani and Niccolò Tribolo.

Villa garden designs were modified to accommodate changing needs over time. Medieval gardens were strictly business, as they had to feed the household. It was not until the Renaissance that embellishments like benches and statues were judiciously added. Rosemary, bay, myrtle and other herbs and medicinal plants were introduced as the garden evolved into a place of pleasure and contemplation. Many gardens contain topiary of yew, cypress, box and ilex, bringing green architecture into the mix.

The role of the garden today in our technology-driven lifestyles may be even more important, and "the principles" of old gardens, as Wharton called them—"to escape, to enjoy, to behold our own patch of beauty and pleasure"—can be applied to your own backyard, rooftop and window box. (Note: Follow in Wharton's footsteps with an Italian tour led by the Mount later this month; visit edithwharton.org for more information.)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443324404577593250878228644.html

NY Times on The Mount

Appreciating Edith Wharton’s Other Career

John Arthur

The library at the Mount, in western Massachusetts.

By JULIE LASKY

Published: August 29, 2012

In 1911, her marriage in tatters, Edith Wharton sailed to Europe, where she remained for the rest of her life. Ahead were many productive years of novel writing and a Pulitzer Prize. Behind was the Mount, her country estate in western Massachusetts, to which she applied her formidable design skills.

Wharton was no dilettante. In 1897, she and the architect Ogden Codman, who had worked on her homes in New York and Newport, R.I., published “The Decoration of Houses,” a book that railed against the decorative excesses of the Gilded Age and called for a return to classical principles like symmetry. Wharton was championing nothing less than an American Renaissance, said Richard Guy Wilson, an architectural historian at the University of Virginia and the author of “Edith Wharton at Home: Life at the Mount,” out next week from Monacelli Press ($45). The book, which is illustrated with archival and recent photos of the estate (it currently serves as a cultural center, attracting 30,000 visitors a year), marks the 150th anniversary of Wharton’s birth and the 100th anniversary of the year the Mount officially left her hands.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/garden/appreciating-edith-whartons-other-career.html

Edith Wharton's Grave: Restoration Plans

Dear Wharton Society Members, Recently, members of the Wharton Society traveling in France have noted the deteriorating state of Wharton’s grave at Versailles.  We have received an estimate from the cemetery, indicating that we can have the gravestone re-engraved and the grounds surrounding it restored for a cost of 915 Euros.  The Wharton Society Board has voted to proceed with this restoration.  We will be using some Wharton Society funds and would like to invite you as Society members to donate funds, if you wish.  The two donation options, check and credit card (via PayPal), are described below.  The deadline for donations is SEPTEMBER 30, 2012.   Donation by check: Please send checks to Wharton Society Treasurer, Carole Shaffer-Koros; email Gary Totten for the address. Please indicate on the check that this is a donation for the “Wharton Gravesite Restoration.”   Donation by credit card through PayPal: If you wish to donate by credit card through PayPal, please use the “Donate” button at the link below. http://www.edithwhartonsociety/memform.htm Please be sure to use the “Donate” button on the right and not the Membership Payment Options on the left. If you are paying with PayPal, please include a note indicating that this is for the “Wharton Gravesite Restoration.”  There should be an option in PayPal to include a note with your payment.  If you are unable to locate this feature, please send an email to Gary Totten (gary.totten@ndsu.edu) letting me know that you have made the online donation through PayPal. The Society is considering options for ways to create an ongoing fund to supply flowers at Wharton’s grave on the anniversary of her birthday and death.  We will inform the Society membership of these plans as they develop. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Gary Totten (gary.totten@ndsu.edu). Thanks and best wishes, Gary Totten

Jennie Fields's Age of Desire and Anna Bahlmann's letters

EnlargeBeinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Edith Wharton moved to Paris in the early 1900s. Not long after, in 1913, after her affair with Morton Fullerton had ended, she divorced her husband of more than 20 years.

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From NPR

August 10, 2012

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/10/158237287/age-of-desire-how-wharton-lost-her-innocence

Jennie Fields was well into her new novel about Edith Wharton — and her love affair with a young journalist — when she heard that a new cache of Wharton letters had been discovered. They were written to Anna Bahlmann, who was first Wharton's governess and later her literary secretary. Bahlmann had never been considered a major influence on Wharton, but Fields had decided to make her a central character in her book, The Age of Desire, even before she heard about the letters. She says she felt certain that Wharton and Bahlmann had a strong relationship.

"They had been together for a great part of Edith's life and I knew they had to have been close," Fields says. "So I imagined that was true, but when the letters came out and supported it all, it was eerie and thrilling at the same time."

So Fields got in touch with Irene Goldman-Price, the Wharton scholar who was editing the letters for a new collection called My Dear Governess. The two bonded over their love of Wharton. Goldman-Price says she was fascinated by the fictional world Fields was creating.

"Her imagination makes these people come alive in my mind in ways that they had not before," she says.

Those people are, first and foremost, Edith Wharton, who, according to Goldman-Price, was just coming into her own at the age of 45, where the novel begins.

"She has just finally made a success of writing, which is something that she's wanted to do since she was at least 12 years old," Goldman-Price says. "In 1905, The House of Mirthcomes out. It is not her first novel, but it is her first truly successful novel. She's really feeling her oats."

Enter Morton Fullerton, a young journalist Wharton met while living in Paris. Though he traveled in sophisticated circles, Fullerton wasn't particularly remarkable — but he was charming. And, according to Fields, he had a dubious reputation.

"He was very drawn, apparently, to power and success," Fields says. "He had had affairs with other successful people, both men and women. He was something of a sociopath because he would have these affairs and he would just disappear; [that] was his MO."

SAMLA Panel on Edith Wharton

Proposed Panel for the 2012 SAMLA Conference

Affiliated Society Session: Edith Wharton Society

Panel Title:  The Transatlantic Writer: Edith Wharton, Text, and Travel

Equipment Needs:             computer, overhead projector/screen, Internet access, PowerPoint software

Submitted by:            Mary Carney

Associate Professor of English, Honors Program Director, and Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership

Gainesville State College

3820 Mundy Mill Road, Oakwood, GA 30566

Cell: (706) 224-3218; Work: (678) 717-3629

mcarney@gsc.edu

Chair and Secretary:  Mary Carney, Gainesville State College

Panel:           

“The Decoration of Houses to The Book of Homelessness: Edith Wharton and Expatriation”

Heath Sledge, Teaching Fellow, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

heathl@email.unc.edu

 “(Con)textualizing Total War: Conflict, Exile, and Material Culture in Wharton’s Essays”

Mary Carney, Associate Professor of English, Gainesville State College

mcarney@gsc.edu

“Traveling from Despair: Edith Wharton’s Heroines, No Accidental Tourists”

Justin Askins, Professor of English, Radford University

jaskins@radford.edu

“Ethan Frome’s Travel Choices” 

Richard Law, Associate Professor of English and Communication, Alvernia University

no email; 610-769-8205

Panel Title: “The Transatlantic Writer: Edith Wharton, Text, and Travel”

Panel Description:

The Edith Wharton Society panel addresses this year’s SAMLA conference theme: "Text as Memoir: Tales of Travel, Immigration, and Exile," examining a wide sections of fiction and non-fiction works.  Edith Wharton is a transatlantic figure whose writings focus on the sometimes fraught interplay between home and exile. In “The Decoration of Houses to The Book of Homelessness: Edith Wharton and Expatriation,” Heath Sledge argues that two pairs of books by Wharton, which bookend the beginning and the end of her career, treat the question of home. The House of Mirth (1905) and the much later Age of Innocence (1920) show Wharton’s progressively broadening notion of what “home” is. 

The second pair -- The Decoration of Houses (1897) and The Book of the Homeless (1916) -- reveals that Wharton’s sense of home was a deeply material one, linked to her identity as a writer and a woman.  As a result, Wharton attempts to materialize her missing home textually in the rich descriptive detail of The Age of Innocence in a way that she had seemed not to need to do in The House of Mirth. The second panelist Mary Carney will present “(Con)textualizing Total War: Conflict, Exile, and Material Culture in Wharton’s Essays.” She will examine how the essays in Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort parallel travel texts, creating vivid portraits of the emergence of “total war” in France during World War I. As a transatlantic writer, she illuminates for her primarily American audience the material culture of war and the peculiar world of expatriates in France during the conflict. In the third presentation, Justin Askins will explore the leitmotiv of travel as escape in “Traveling from Despair: Edith Wharton’s Heroines, No Accidental Tourists.” While rarely compared with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Wharton’s major works share with these novels the important leitmotiv of travel as escape. Examining major novels and novellas, Askins will illuminate Wharton’s narrative trajectories of the American pursuit of transformative exile. Finally, in “Ethan Frome’s Travel Choices,” Richard Law examines the character development that reveals the courage and misapprehensions of Ethan’s travel dreams. Law shows how the trail of (mis)judgments leads to the catastrophic escape attempt, reflecting Wharton’s portrait of a grotesque reality emerging from the search for exile.

STREETSCAPES/MARY MASON JONES A Woman With an Architectural Appetite

New York Times

Office for Metropolitan History

Marble Row on Fifth Avenue, looking south from 58th Street, with Mary Mason Jones’s house at the far right, at the 57th Street corner, about 1899.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: July 5, 2012

In society in the 19th century, Jones was a grand name of the first order. The daughter of the president of Chemical Bank, Mrs. Jones was considered remarkable in her day: she was an early traveler on the Erie Canal, voyaged through Europe on a sketching tour, and in 1818, after her marriage to Isaac Jones, had the first bathtub in New York installed in her house on Chambers Street. She and two sisters had a triple house on Broadway near Waverly Place; the houses could be thrown together for entertaining.

In 1868, Mrs. Jones began work on another unusual house, at the northeast corner of Fifth and 57th, a part of the city then still on the drawing board, with streets laid out and little more.

The New York Times noted that the two-story mansard roof was carried to “a fabulous height.” That was not the only distinctive aspect: Mrs. Jones also built a neighborhood, an entire row of houses taking up the rest of the block on Fifth Avenue. She had her architect, Robert Mook, clad them in brilliant white marble.

Numbered 741-753 Fifth, they were quite a spectacle in brownstone New York. The marble set off the green grass in the front gardens, the gray slate of the mansard and the green copper trim.

In 1871, a writer for The New York Evening Telegram found the year-old row reminiscent of a church, with Mrs. Jones’s grand house as the front, facing 57th Street, and the rest of the row, stretching back along Fifth, like a nave. Four years later, The Real Estate Record and Guide, while admiring the whole, was able to find fault, saying, “The poverty of the deck cornice spoils the whole when you look more closely.” Apparently this referred to the simplicity of the projection where the main wall meets the mansard.

Mrs. Jones rented out the row, and the 1870 census indicates that her tenants were her equals, at least financially. One was Cyrus Clark, later to be important in developing the Upper West Side, and another was Henry Havemeyer, the sugar merchant, who went on to build a grand house at Fifth and 66th.

Read the rest at 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/realestate/streetscapes-a-woman-with-an-architectural-appetite.html?_r=
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