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.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Edith Wharton and War
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.”
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.”
Monday, August 16, 2010
Edith Wharton bio for young adults
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.
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.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Frances McDormand reading Edith Wharton
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
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
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Edith Wharton to be inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame
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.
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.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
NY Times Obituary: Louis Auchincloss
Louis Auchincloss, Chronicler of New York’s Upper Crust, Dies at 92
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.
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
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.
. . . . . . . . .
Monday, January 25, 2010
New issues of the Edith Wharton Review
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.
.
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.
.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
The Big Read: The Age of Innocence
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
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
Monday, December 28, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Edith Wharton Society Research Award
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Digested Classic: The Age of Innocence
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.
(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.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Vote for The Mount
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!
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!
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Edith Wharton Always Had Paris
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]
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]
Thursday, August 06, 2009
The Wharton Salon
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
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
Sunday, August 02, 2009
THE REEF on BBC7
A radio play of The Reef is available online at BBC7: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00b5pxf/episodes/player
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Lying on the couch at the Mount
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.
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.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Edith Wharton letters
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.
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.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Wharton's letters
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
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]
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]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)