Wharton Collection and Mount Research Award Winners

Beinecke Wharton Collection Award: Melanie Dawson, College of William and Mary, “Ageist Modernity: Generational Obsessions in the Work of Edith Wharton and Her Contemporaries” Dawson will examine Wharton’s letters and drafts of her later fiction for clues to the ways in which her sense of age, beauty, and women’s cultural position were bound up in one another and the ways in which her understanding of these issues may have changed over time and across manuscript revisions. Mount Research Award: Kaye Wierzbicki, Harvard University, “‘Thinking Away the Flowers’: Edith Wharton and a Return to Form.” In addition to the Mount’s physical gardens,Wierzbicki will examine Wharton’s annotations and markings in scientific and evolutionary texts and the extensive collection of horticultural and landscape design texts in her library, spanning subjects from arboriculture to irises and from Italian Renaissance gardens to Japanese rock gardens. Wierzbicki will consider Wharton’s thinking about the relationship between text and garden and between garden and nation.