Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Hermione Lee's bio of Wharton

Self-Made Man

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee · Chatto, 853 pp, £25.00

Edith Wharton’s ‘background’ – the word is her own – has always seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says nothing about these rumours, but it is easy to see how her own accounts of the past would have fuelled them. Despite the fact that she recalled ‘making up’ stories from her first conscious moment, both her memoirs and her fiction represent the world of her childhood as pretty much impervious to the imagination. ‘In the well-regulated well-fed Summers world,’ her heroine recalls in The Reef (1912), ‘the unusual was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited.’ Anna Leath’s memory of Old New York is scarcely distinguishable from her creator’s. ‘In a community composed entirely of people like her parents and her parents’ friends she did not see how the magnificent things one read about could ever have happened.’

Asked what she wished to be when she grew up, Lucretia Jones’s small daughter dutifully replied (as she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in that of other 19th-century women writers, identifying with a father might have been more to the point. But while she speaks more fondly of her father than of her ‘beautifully dressed mother’, the most she can manage for his literary influence is a wistful fantasy of a ‘rather rudimentary love of verse’ – predictably stifled, as she imagines it, by his wife’s ‘matter-of-factness’ – and an immense debt of gratitude for his ‘gentleman’s library’.

That library is the scene of the child’s most formative experiences and the occasion for her warmest recollections of the past. Even her mother’s prohibition of novel-reading proves ironically fruitful, as it prevents her ‘wasting . . . time over ephemeral rubbish’ and throws her back instead to ‘the great classics’. Both the impressive range of Wharton’s later reading and her lifelong habits of self-education evidently had their origins here. Characteristically, the arrangement of domestic architecture doubles in her telling as an architecture of the self: ‘there was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude.’

Books offered a way out of Old New York; and by the time she published her autobiography, Wharton’s own library contained some four thousand of them, divided between her two houses in France. Yet in Wharton’s retrospective account of herself, the small child’s imaginative resistance to her environment precedes even the ability to decipher print. Edith had not yet learned to read when she first engaged in that ecstatic and solitary ritual she called ‘making up’: though she always required a book as a prop, the very unintelligibility of the pages with which she gestured permitted her to evoke whatever her fancy chose. Even before she was a reader, in other words, she was a storyteller; and the stories she was busy telling were of alternative worlds and alternative selves.

If there is some myth-making in this portrait of the artist, that myth is itself one of her many creations. Though the mature novelist would express great scorn for the American belief in perpetual self-improvement, the construction of Edith Wharton, as Hermione Lee’s biography demonstrates, was a lifelong activity. The absence of Wharton’s important women friends from A Backward Glance, Lee suggests, intensifies the impression that the achievement was the author’s alone. With formidable energy, she turned herself into an interior decorator, a writer, a charitable organiser, a war correspondent, an honorary Frenchwoman, a gardener; and at the height of her earning power, the proceeds from her books far exceeded the income she had inherited. Despite the substantial comfort into which she was born – or because of it – there is considerable truth in a friend’s joke that both Teddy Roosevelt and Edith Wharton were ‘self-made men’.

‘Atrophy,’ Lee notes, was one of Wharton’s key words; and ‘paralysis in America . . . what she most feared’. Though the spare New England setting of Ethan Frome (1911) is far removed from the well-stuffed interiors of Wharton’s childhood, the relentless plot of that novel, in which dreams of suicidal escape end in literal paralysis and the protagonist’s hated wife is nightmarishly doubled by his immobilised lover, grimly dramatises its author’s terror. Closer to home, and to the immobility against which the young Edith chafed, is the ‘static force’ of Lily Bart’s aunt in The House of Mirth (1905): ‘To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor.’ Long after Wharton herself had escaped first into writing and then to Europe, her narratives enter the cul-de-sac in which Lily passively colludes in her own destruction. But tugging at that furniture also gave her energy – so much so that she gleefully screwed it to the floor again and again. The satirical vehemence with which Wharton represents her parents’ world can make it easy to forget that the obdurate environment of Old New York is at least partly her creation too.

Furniture was more than a metaphor for Wharton. ‘You don’t know her till you have seen her as builder and restorer, designer, decorator, gardener,’ Henry James wrote to another impassioned interior decorator, their mutual friend Mary Hunter, in 1913. At the time, Wharton was contemplating the purchase of a substantial estate near where Hunter lived in Essex; but while this came to nothing, the novelist’s relations with domestic property loom almost as large in her history as her relations with books. An often repeated anecdote in A Backward Glance tells of her first attempt at novel-writing being summarily quashed by her literal-minded mother, who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“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”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze up her daughter’s energies should not obscure the premonitory significance of the exchange. From Wharton’s first published book, The Decoration of Houses, written with Ogden Codman in 1897, to the extravagant gardens at her French property in Hyères whose design she oversaw in her sixties, her imagination was deeply invested in the arrangement of domestic space. Though Mrs Edward (Teddy) Wharton began her married life in a ‘cottage’ on her mother’s Newport estate, a substantial legacy from a millionaire cousin in the late 1880s assured that none of her future drawing-rooms would belong to her mother. Codman worked with Wharton on houses for the couple in Newport and New York: Land’s End, an $80,000 mansion overlooking the Atlantic that she later described as ‘incurably’ ugly, and ‘a little shanty in Park Avenue’ that she and Teddy called the smallest house in New York. These were followed by her most famous residence in the US – the 35-room mansion known as The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts – and eventually by apartments in Paris, an 18th-century villa near Fontainebleau, and the Provençal house that she named Ste-Claire-le-Château, built on the site of a 17th-century convent in the old part of Hyères. Only The Mount was constructed from scratch, but all bore the unmistakeable imprint of Wharton’s design.

A sophisticated gardener as well as interior decorator, whose Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) is still cited by writers on garden history, Wharton threw herself into the arrangement of plants and flowers with the same passion and eye for detail that she devoted to her books. Reconstructing gardens in print is not easy, but Lee makes a convincing case for the theatrical flair and colour of Wharton’s. Towards the end of her life, Wharton herself told a friend that she thought her gardens were ‘better than her books’. However that may be, they were clearly more ephemeral: one of the most poignant episodes in Lee’s biography concerns Wharton’s devastation when a catastrophic frost in the winter of 1928-29 wiped out virtually everything she had planted at Hyères. ‘How dangerous to care too much,’ she noted in her diary, ‘even for a garden!’

Wharton’s zeal for home-making had little to do with her feelings for her husband. Long before she divorced him in 1913, her publicly acknowledged affections attached themselves more to place than to family. ‘I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last,’ she joked to a friend in anticipation of the move to Hyères in 1922. Though her marriage endured for 28 years, she and Teddy seem to have had scarcely anything in common apart from a zest for travel, a love of motor cars and a fondness for little dogs; and the increasing evidence of his mental illness – what we would now call bipolar disorder or manic depression – meant that most observers seem to have sympathised with the wife. ‘A divorce is always a good thing to have: you never can tell when you may want it,’ a friend advises the superbly vulgar heroine of The Custom of the Country (1913), the fierce satire of contemporary American mores that was appearing in serial form even as Wharton filed for divorce in a Paris court. Lee contends that previous biographers have unduly emphasised the ladylike reluctance with which Wharton took that step: once it had become clear that Teddy was impossible to live with, she argues, Wharton proceeded to free herself with grim determination. The heroine of The Custom of the Country is emphatically not her author; but neither the appetite nor the ambition of Undine Spragg (‘US’, in short) was altogether alien to her. Attacking the very ease with which the thrice-divorced Undine sheds inconvenient partners would have helped to drive home the difference.

At the age of 20, Edith Jones had been briefly engaged to a wealthy young man called Harry Stevens; but according to Town Topics, the sort of gossip rag she would send up in The House of Mirth, ‘an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride’ caused the engagement to be broken off. She first became acquainted with the lawyer and future diplomat Walter Berry in the aftermath of that engagement; in later years, many who knew them assumed that she and Berry were lovers. But the truth about this long-lived intimacy, as about much of Wharton’s private life, is elusive. Though she could make high comedy out of her mother’s habits of censorship, her own powers of concealment rivaled Lucretia’s. Berry’s death in 1927 may have left Wharton ‘utterly rudderless’, as she wrote to Bernard Berenson; but she still managed to get into his Paris apartment and to burn almost all the letters she had ever written to him. ‘No words can say, because such things are unsayable, how the influence of his thought, his character, his deepest personality, were interwoven with mine,’ she declared in A Backward Glance; but this is far from the only aspect of her history, as Lee makes clear, that is treated as ‘unsayable’. In that book Teddy himself puts in only the most minimal appearance, while he disappears entirely from the published records of their travels in Italy and France. Wharton’s mother once instructed her to ‘look out of the other window’ when the notorious mistress of a New York banker was passing in her carriage; and A Backward Glance sedulously looks elsewhere when it comes to the passionate affair the still-married author herself conducted with the journalist Morton Fullerton in her forties.

She would have thought it a bitter irony that Fullerton’s own casualness with his papers has made this one of her most extensively documented relationships. Wharton’s complete letters have yet to be published, but only Berenson appears more frequently as a correspondent in the selection edited by R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis in 1988. ‘I beg instant cremation for this,’ she was writing to Fullerton almost from the start; but the fact that the erotically adventurous Fullerton had already been the victim of one blackmail attempt does not seem to have made him wary about the survival of evidence. Yet Wharton’s instinct for privacy contended against her needs as a writer; and even before some three hundred of her letters to Fullerton mysteriously surfaced in 1985, R.W.B. Lewis was able to reconstruct the story of their affair from a secret diary that she had preserved and named, after a poem by Pierre Ronsard, ‘The Life Apart: L’Ame Close’. When Lewis’s biography first appeared in 1975, his detailed account of the affair, together with the reprinting of ‘Beatrice Palmato’, a hitherto unknown fragment of soft porn about father-daughter incest, appeared to overturn the established image of Wharton as a strait-laced grande dame – ‘puritanically repressed within’, in Lewis’s phrase, as well as formidable without. The passage of time, however, as well as considerable scholarship on Victorian sexuality, has made the erotic intensity of all that strait-lacing seem less surprising than inevitable. Without minimising the reality of the affair, Lee also makes clear how much of Wharton’s creative powers were invested in the experience. Kept concurrently with her appointments diary, ‘The Life Apart’ both records and invents the author’s belated awakening to love.

[for more, click on the link]

Boston Globe interview with Hermione Lee

Q&A with Hermione Lee

By Kate Bolick | April 1, 2007

A third of the way through her absorbing new biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee pauses to consider her subject's erotic appeal to Morton Fullerton, the notorious rogue she'd taken, in midlife, as her lover. "Exposing the concealed, thwarted, passionate self hidden under the gloves and furs could have been very intriguing to a certain kind of curious, adventurous sensualist," she writes. And, perhaps, to a certain kind of biographer?

"Well, that's it!" Lee laughed when I asked her as much over the phone last week. "Edith does this extraordinary mixture of dazzling ironical objective analysis, yet at the same time, there's this very deep, painful emotional life that goes rushing through. I was drawn to this combination that I don't think I've found in any other writer," she explained. The first-name basis, the disarming present tense -- it was easy to envision the grande dame herself hovering just beyond our conversation, a cup of tea at her elbow (in, of course, the perfect hand-painted Limoges porcelain cup)

. . .

IDEAS: Wharton's reputation has shifted drastically over the years.

LEE: Well, in her lifetime, starting with "The House of Mirth" in 1905, she became hugely popular and an enormous bestseller. Then, in the 1930s, with the Depression, and the radical change of style and much more openness coming in about sexuality, she began to be seen as frosty and old-fashioned and as kind of a minor feminine Henry James. So from her death in 1937 through the '60s she languished.

And then interesting things happened: the big biography in 1975 by R.W.B. Lewis; the publication of quite a lot of posthumous papers, which changed our sense of her; the feminist movement of the late '60s and early '70s, when Wharton, like a lot of other women writers, was given a new standing. And, of course, the movies.

. . .

IDEAS: Yet even now, she's still seen as a passionless woman.

LEE: Unfair to Edith! Morton Fullerton clearly found her rather erotic, and he was a specialist in those things. When he finally delivers his copy of "Terminus" -- the long, Whitmanesque poem that she wrote after their night of love in the Charing Cross Hotel (which, I must say, is the most unromantic building in all of London) -- to Elisina Tyler, Edith's closest woman friend, years after Edith's death, he says that her reputation for being cold and icy was unjustified.

Besides, you can see from the writing how much she knew about sex and sexuality. "The Reef" is the most amazing novel about someone who hasn't been very sexy suddenly having all these sexual emotions of jealousy and dependency and humiliation. It's very close to the bone.

IDEAS: The Fullerton years are pretty juicy. Why did this strong, independent woman fall for such a cad?

LEE: Well, women do, don't they? The really interesting thing is the way the affair -- which lasted two or three years maximum -- seemed to reenact and anticipate an Edith Wharton novel. Her letters to him, and the way he let her down, and the fact that she couldn't lean on him during her husband's mental illness and the breakdown of her marriage. . . .You can see Fullerton distancing himself, backing off, thinking, "Oh this is more than I bargained for." It's just like one of her stories, like "The Long Run," or Lawrence Selden in "The House of Mirth." It's almost as if she picked the sort of person she already knew about from her fiction. The magnificent letters she wrote to Fullerton could have come straight from the mouth of one of her heroines.

IDEAS: She was also deeply invested in style, as you point out, and caught up in the conversations at the turn of the century about the morality of taste.

LEE: One of the fascinating things about Edith's relationship to Europe is how much she was enthralled to Flaubert and Stendhal and Balzac. She wanted to write novels of society and novels of manners -- not about isolated individuals -- that's for sure. And she wanted to write with the utmost, Flaubertian objectivity. So she never says "I" in the fiction; she says "I" in the poetry (which I think is much less good than the fiction).

Yet her own life plays through in many complicated ways in all her writing. She was wedded to the idea of objectivity, control, shape, form -- she's a great shaper of sentences, sentence by sentence on the page; at her best she's a remarkable stylist. But at the same time she didn't want to be classified as a sentimental woman novelist, in the way that often happens in that period: she's harsh, strong, powerful, direct, often kind of barren and plain.

Review of Hermione Lee's biography of Wharton

Edith Wharton

* Patricia Anderson
* February 24, 2007

Edith Wharton
By Hermione Lee
Chatto & Windus, 845pp, $79.95

IN the market-driven world of publishing, breathless comments on a book's back cover are increasingly unhelpful: "A rich new life of a great novelist", "first biography of Edith Wharton by a British woman writer", "challenges the accepted view", and so on. All very irritating. The first suggests that former biographers of Wharton had scant insight into her intricately layered life, the second that the respected biographer, Hermione Lee, needs to be identified as a woman rather than simply a British writer, the third that there is some accepted view of the remarkable Wharton, a kind of cuckoo in a brownstone nest, that needs to be challenged. Not so. The phenomenon of Edith Wharton, a writer more celebrated in her day than her friend Henry James (a fact he chafed at), and whose book The Mother's Recompense outsold Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, was dissected by R.W.B. Lewis in his Pulitzer prize-winning 1975 biography. It was a miracle of compression, insight and graceful writing, and would always be a difficult act to follow, as this new biography demonstrates.

That said, Lee's magisterial work will delight the forensically-minded Wharton fan, not so much for new insights (this reviewer found few) but for "new archive material", and the sheer scale of the digressions and meanderings throughout its 845 pages. Indeed, she has succumbed to the biographer's greatest weakness: not knowing what to dispense with.

London Times review of new Hermione Lee biography of Wharton

From The Times (London)

When Edith Wharton died in 1937 she was working on two books. One, The Buccaneers, a novel about vivacious young American heiresses marrying into Britain’s aristocracy, celebrates female vitality. The other was a collection of ghost stories. Together, they highlight qualities — dauntless energy, haunted responsiveness to the past — that, as Hermione Lee’s biography demonstrates, made her into America’s greatest woman novelist.

Wharton spent her early years in a world as strait-laced as a whalebone corset. The Old New York brownstone élite into which she was born in 1862 was a society stiff with plutocratic correctness, typified by her mother Lucretia, a glacial assemblage of expensive clothes and conventional attitudes. In this milieu, Edith’s bookishness marked her out as a misfit (rumours that she must be illegitimate persisted). Her first attempt, aged 11, at a novel, which 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’ ”, was returned by her mother with the icy comment, “Drawing-rooms are always tidy.” A photograph of her as a debutante, rigid in flounced finery, testifies to the strain she felt.

The “suitable” marriage she was steered into at 23 intensified this. An affable, sporty duffer unable to rise to what he called Edith’s “high plain of thought”, Teddy Wharton proved a disastrous husband. Marital misery (later a prominent theme in her fiction) soon took its toll. Nervous prostrations plagued them both. Sexually, the marriage seems to have been more or less a nonstarter. Emotionally and intellectually, there was an ever-widening gulf. After years of increasingly unstable behaviour, Teddy (like his father, who committed suicide in an asylum) sank into manic-depressive derangement.

Not surprisingly, thwarted lives and bids to escape them feature frequently in Wharton’s fiction. But it wasn’t, Lee reminds you, until the age of 43, with The House of Mirth, her bestselling novel about the elegant savageries of Gilded Age New York, that she made her literary breakthrough. Before that, her pent-up energies found vent in marathons of reading, the creation of an imposing country house and garden in New England, and increasingly adventurous travels. Motoring became a passion (exhilaratingly transmitted in travelogues about her “braveries of far excursionism”, as her friend and sometimes fellow-passenger, Henry James, put it). Europe bewitched and liberated her. The autobiography she wrote in her seventies glows with scenes recalled from visits there as a child: artists’ models lounging among daffodils and violets on Rome’s Spanish Steps, scarlet and gold cardinals rumbling though Trastevere in their coaches at twilight, Second Empire beauties swaying in open carriages under the chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne. As her career blossomed, she spent more and more time first in Italy, then France, where she lived for her last three decades.

Devoting two-thirds of its length to these French years, Lee’s biography differs from previous ones in emphasising Wharton’s European experiences such as her prodigies of relief work for her adopted country during the first world war (she ran an organisation that, she calculated, helped 9,229 refugees, served 235,000 meals and distributed 48,333 garments to the needy in its first year alone). There are also detailed accounts of the homes, the Pavillon Colombe north of Paris and Ste-Claire-le-Château overlooking Hyères on the Riviera, between which she divided her post-war summers and winters. True to the large-scale lifestyle to which inherited wealth and even greater literary earnings accustomed her, she considered the Pavillon, a three-storey, 18th-century gem, to be a “tiny bungalow”. Ste-Claire, which had seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, a dining room, drawing room, study, 2,000-volume library, morning room, kitchen, scullery, pantry, linen-room, sewing-room and butler’s “brushing room”, was “minuscule”.

Closer attention is given here than elsewhere to Wharton’s secret affair, not long before the terminal breakdown of her marriage, with Morton Fullerton, an American journalist in Paris with a gaudy history of bisexual liaisons and blackmail threats. Her emotional letters to him, a burningly candid private journal she kept during their two years as lovers and an achingly erotic poem about a parting night of passion in a railway hotel convey, as if in some unsparing, voluptuous novella by Colette, the grateful pleasure, confusion and humiliation of a physically inexperienced woman in her forties entangled with a silkily proficient philanderer.

Wharton and Dieting

From Spiked: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2782/
Fretting over our waistlines has a long history. There was already medical discussion about the problem of obesity in the late nineteenth century, but as a ‘product rather than a cause’ of the prejudice against excess weight. Within a few years, this issue started impacting on popular culture. In 1907 a popular American play called Nobody Likes a Fat Man was staged, and in 1913 Edith Wharton described one of her characters fretting about being anything more than ‘perpendicular’. As the authors of Diet Nation note, in one respect ‘the century-long European and American preoccupation with thinness and the rejection of fat is very much a social construct in which obesity is increasingly associated with the morally unacceptable’ (p33).

[Note: The Custom of the Country was published in 1913.]

Play based on Wharton's life

From Variety: pair launch production company

Producers Jennifer Chaiken and Sebastian Dungan have launched 72 Prods., a Los Angeles-based production shingle backed by a private equity fund dedicated to acquisition and development of feature film projects in the $5 million-to-$25 million budget range.

Current projects on the 72 slate:"The Perfect Hour," penned by Deborah Quinn and Derek Simonds, who will also direct. The drama's set in 1907 and based on a recently discovered cache of Edith Wharton's letters that revealed that Wharton -- though married -- was a virgin until an affair in her forties with a younger man. "Hour" will be produced in association with Ross Katz ("Marie Antoinette," "Lost in Translation").

Edith Wharton and Newport

From the New York Times:

Mr. Fleming, an urban planner based in Cambridge, Mass., who has written six books on historic preservation, has a proselytizing zeal on the subject of America's great mansions, and a consuming obsession with the welfare of his own. Hoping to make it a comfortable gathering place for his children in the wake of his recent divorce, he set about restoring it to its one-time glory. The project took seven years, and was finally completed late last month.

Luckily, he had a guide in this undertaking: "The Decoration of Houses," the influential handbook that Codman published with his client and friend Edith Wharton in 1897. Codman and Wharton, who often bickered, were as one in their disdain for the pompous Newport "cottages" built by Gilded Age robber barons, and for the "dubious eclecticism" of High Victorian style. They advocated a return to "suitability, simplicity and proportion," ideals in keeping with Mr. Fleming's stringent classical tastes, and very much in evidence in Codman's design for Bellevue House.

Edith Wharton Dinner at MLA 2006

The Edith Wharton Society is sponsoring a dinner event at the 2006 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. The dinner will be at 7 p.m. on December 28, 2006, at

Ristorante La Buca
711 Locust Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215) 928-0556

The restaurant is about 8 blocks from the Marriott.

Please send your check in US funds for $35 for members and $45 for non-members per person and the reservation form by

December 10, 2006

to

Carole Shaffer-Koros
VE 114A
1000 Morris Avenue
Kean University
Union, NJ 07083

If you have mislaid the sign-up form from the recent _Edith Wharton Review_, a printable form suitable for sending with your check is available here: http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/whartondinner2006.htm

Edith Wharton Stories Performed

From Helene Davis:

SYMPHONY SPACE RELEASES TWO NEW SELECTED SHORTS CD SETS: EDITH WHARTON and FALLING IN LOVE

Read By KATHLEEN CHALFANT, MARIA TUCCI, JANE CURTIN, FIONNULA FLANAGAN, WILLIAM HURT & OTHERS

New York, NY, November 22, 2006 - Symphony Space has released two new CD sets from its award-winning National Public Radio series, Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story: Falling In Love and Edith Wharton. The series, which presents Broadway and Hollywood actors reading classic and new short stories, is now in its 20th radio season.

EDITH WHARTON (2-CD set: running time, 2 hours)

EDITH WHARTON features five stories which were recorded live at the Mount, the Massachusetts home of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was best known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Wharton's central subjects were the conflict between social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the 'nouveau riche,' who had made their fortunes in more recent years.

• Mrs. Manstey’s View, read by Kathleen Chalfant. You are what you view - an Edith Wharton-era real estate story.
• Roman Fever, read by Maria Tucci.What happened that night in Rome so long ago? The secret revealed.
• The Reckoning, read by Brenda Wehle. The high price of marital harmony.
• Xingu, read by Christina Pickles. Wild goings-on at a ladies' book group.
  

FALLING IN LOVE (3-CD set, running time 3 hours)

This new 3-CD set features the following stories, which were recorded live at Symphony Space in NYC:

• Fires by Rick Bass, read by Ted Marcoux. In the Rockies a woman sets fire to a parched field to take the plunge into the pool of love.
• The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping by Padgett Powell, read by Christina Pickles. An eccentric southern dame cleans up her act and finds love.
• The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin, read by Hope Davis. A New York artist longs for love and marital domesticity.
• Melisande by E. Nesbit, read by Jane Curtin. A delicious fairy tale about a princess with a terrible curse.
• Violets by Edna O’Brien, read by Fionnula Flanagan. A subtle portrait of a woman caught in an impossible affair.
• Travis, B. by Maile Meloy, read by William Hurt. A Western love story between a lonesome cowboy and a city gal.
  

The CD sets are available on the Symphony Space website, at www.symphonyspace.org. For information on any Symphony Space program or event, call (212) 864-5400.


GENERAL INFORMATION

For nearly 30 years, Symphony Space has been producing and presenting artistically and culturally diverse music, dance, literary, theatre, family, and film programs that bring artists and audiences together in an atmosphere of exploration and intimacy. One of New York’s preeminent and most reasonably priced cultural resources, and a leader in adventurous programming, its signature events include Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, hosted by Isaiah Sheffer and nationally broadcast on public radio; Bloomsday on Broadway readings; Upper West Fest, a three-week cultural extravaganza involving more than twenty neighborhood institutions; and Wall to Wall music events and other marathons, which The New York Times called Symphony Space’s “annual gift to New York City.” Symphony Space’s programs reach audiences throughout New York and, via its touring and media program, the nation. Symphony Space also serves thousands of New York City schoolchildren each year via its Curriculum Arts Project, one of the oldest and most respected arts education programs in existence. Symphony Space’s Artistic Director is Isaiah Sheffer; Executive Director, Cynthia Elliott; and Managing Director, Peggy Wreen.

Haunted Mount?

From Capetown, South Africawww.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=iol1162365405524A136]- From novelist Edith Wharton's palatial mansion in Lenox, Massachusetts, to a Gold Rush shack in This Old House on Tuesday profiled 15 of the nation's spookiest houses - and offered some tips on how to hire a reliable ghostbuster.
. . .

Wharton, who died in 1937 at the age of 75, is said to still haunt her estate, called The Mount, sending indoor temperatures icy when she appears.

Age of Innocence on TCM, December 20, 2006

The 1934 film version of The Age of Innocence will be shown on Turner Classic Movies on December 20, 2006, at 10:30 a.m. This film is not available on video or DVD, so if you want to see it, this is probably your only chance this year.

Wharton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lewis Carroll

From Calendarlive.com

Thirteen years after "Snark," Carroll published the first part of his novel "Sylvie and Bruno," in which the Professor begins reciting, "Once upon a time there was a Boojum— " and stops. "I forget the rest of the Fable," he admits. "And there was a lesson to be learned from it. I'm afraid I forget that, too." Many people in the real world have also forgotten. In her autobiography, Edith Wharton recounted a story about her friend Theodore Roosevelt, whose enthusiasm for "Snark" led to a farcical scene.

One day, Roosevelt admonished the secretary of the Navy, "Mr. Secretary, what I say three times is true!" And the less literate gentleman replied stiffly, "Mr. President, it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity." How Lewis Carroll would have chuckled over the ironies of posthumous fame.

Wharton and Happiness

New York Observer Review of The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud.

'There are lots of ways to be miserable," Edith Wharton once wrote, "but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that's to stop running around after happiness." In the hundred years since Wharton published these words, Americans, especially the cultural elite, have not learned their lesson.

In New York City, the setting of Wharton's finest fictions -- and where "success" and "happiness" are often used interchangeably -- there's a clock tick-tocking by the bedside of every aspiring young writer or intellectual. If your debut novel hasn't landed by the time you turn 30, you're washed up. If you haven't earned tenure by 40, pack it up. You're through.

About Wyndclyffe

"History vs. the Bulldozer" from Newsday:

On a wooded river bluff in Rhinecliff, N.Y., a Romanesque castle called Wyndclyffe stands boarded up, its roof partly caved in. Surrounded by comparably modest getaways of recent vintage, its once-ample grounds have shrunk to a two-acre lot. This crumbling castle, built in 1853 for an aunt of Gilded Age chronicler Edith Wharton - the spinster Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones - it is said to have been the origin of the expression, "keeping up with the Joneses," because, when it was built, the neighbors rushed to gussy up their own millionaire manors.

Wyndclyffe is among the few dozen imperiled monuments profiled in "Hudson Valley Ruins," by Thomas Rinaldi and Robert J. Yasinsac (University Press of New England, 356 pp., $35).

It takes a middle road between the extravagant picture-book of erstwhile luxury estates and the scholarly architectural catalog, giving overviews of endangered sites by region, and telling in detail the life stories of several properties in each area.

A. R. Gurney and Edith Wharton

From Backstage:

"I love the world he creates -- the way he delineates the WASP tribe, whose heroes are bound and defined by their society," says Lamos, who also helmed Gurney's Big Bill at Lincoln Center Theater and, as artistic director of Hartford Stage, produced Gurney's Children and an adaptation of his novel The Snow Ball. Comparing the playwright to Edith Wharton, Lamos says, "I lived in New England and know the world he's talking about. He is evenhanded and the economy of his writing is unequaled. He is a miniaturist. He just tells you enough, yet the depth and psychology are there. The challenge is to find the simplicity and economy in the staging and cast actors who have sensitivity to tonal shifts that take place in the moment.""

The Edith Wharton Essay Prize (Deadline: 10/30/06)

The Edith Wharton Essay Prize

The Edith Wharton Essay Prize is awarded annually for the best unpublished essay on Edith Wharton by a beginning scholar. Graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty members who have not held a tenure-track or full-time appointment for more than four years are eligible to submit their work.

The winning essay will be published in The Edith Wharton Review, a peer-reviewed journal, and the writer will receive an award of $250.

All entries will be considered for publication in The Edith Wharton Review as well as for the Edith Wharton Essay Prize. Submissions should be 15-25 pages in length and should follow the new 6 th edition MLA style, using endnotes, not footnotes.

Applicants should not identify themselves on the manuscript but should provide a separate cover page that includes their names, academic status, e-mail address, postal addresses, and the notation “The Edith Wharton Essay Prize.”

To submit an essay for the prize, send three copies by 30 October 2006 to either of the editors of The Edith Wharton Review:

Prof. Carole M. Shaffer-Koros
Dean of the School of Visual and Performing Arts
VE-114A
Kean University
Union, NJ 07083

Prof. Linda Costanzo-Cahir
W 1091
Kean University
Union, NJ 07083

The Academy of Music

From the New York Sun:

When the rich families moved away, Union Square became the fancy shopping district. Such stores as Tiffany's and Brentano's Literary Emporium, and restaurants like Delmonico's and Lüchow's, were there. In Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," which is set in the 1870s, society ritually congregates at the Academy of Music, on the northeast corner of 14th Street and Irving Place. (It was torn down for the Consolidated Edison Building, and shouldn't be confused with the much later movie theater called the Academy of Music on the other side of 14th Street.) Theaters abounded around Union Square in the late 19th century, making it the forerunner to today's Times Square theater district.

An allusion to "False Dawn"

From the New York Daily News: Now you see 'em at museums

'Moonlight' by Ralph Blakelock is one of many American paintings now on view that until recently were consigned to storage. In an Edith Wharton novella set in the mid-19th century, the scion of an aristocratic New York family - a young man who has studied art history - travels to Europe to buy "pictures" (what we today would call paintings). Unfortunately, the young man has acquired taste and a serious eye. Instead of buying the opulent, bright - and huge - canvases his relatives imagined adorning the walls of their mansion, he acquires small, exquisite early Renaissance works. The family is mortified. For the rest of his life he is an outcast. Not until after his death, decades later, does the value, both esthetic and financial, of his collection become apparent. The story was one of many in which Wharton deplored the materialism and philistinism of the wealthy, dull people among whom she had grown up. Like wealthy families, museums sometimes acquire things whose value becomes clear only with time.

From 2004 (see also all the NYTimes pieces on Wharton at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/edith_wharton/index.html?inline=nyt-per; registration is required, but some articles are free)

Edith Wharton: A Manhattan Literary Giant Who Didn't Love New York

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: September 12, 2004

DITH WHARTON, whose deft portraits of the upper class are taken as definitive accounts of the late 19th century, remains one of the most potent names in the literature of New York. Not that she was a partisan of the city. Her portraits of New York were almost uniformly negative, and she left the city as soon as she could. That's why, in part, the physical traces of the author of "The Age of Innocence" and "The House of Mirth" are few and far between. Edith Newbold Jones, as she was called at birth, was born in 1862 to George Frederic Jones and his wife, the former Lucretia Rhinelander, both from genteel families with roots in 18th century New York. In 1857 they built a brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street. The house as the family knew it is long gone, but an early photograph shows a wide, Anglo-Italianate-style brownstone mansion four stories high, with rusticated stone on the ground floor and simple window moldings on the floors above. The Jones house had a certain repose about it — it might have been designed by a master builder, or perhaps even a real architect. (Go to NYT for more)

Louis Auchincloss on the Five Best Novellas

The Long and the Short of It
The best novellas.

BY LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Saturday, July 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

From the Wall Street Journal

1. "Madame de Treymes" By Edith Wharton (Scribner's, 1907).

A notable form of fiction, the novella is approved more by the reading public of yesterday than of to day. Its length is hard to specify other than to say that it is usually not long enough to justify a separate publication under its own covers, yet it is certainly a useful form for any subject too simple for a novel but too complex to be fitted within the limits of a short story. Edith Wharton's "Madame de Treymes" is a remarkable example of the form. It is the story of the tactical defeat but moral victory of an honest and upstanding American in his struggle to win a wife from a tightly united but feudally minded French aristocratic family. He loses, but they cheat. It is essentially the same tale with the same moral as James's full-length novel "The American." In a masterpiece of brevity, Wharton dramatizes the contrast between the two opposing forces: the simple and proper old brownstone New York, low in style but high in principle, and the achingly beautiful but decadent Saint-Germain district of Paris. The issue is seamlessly joined.

If Edith Wharton had a blog

From literary blogger Maud Newton :

Unless you’re Thomas Pynchon, it’s not enough these days to write a book and publish it. Today’s author is expected to pimp her novels by any means necessary — with interminable readings, book club talks, temporary tattoos, hideous and ill-fitting t-shirts, fanciful diagrams, and of course blogs. This makes perfect sense. After all, most writers choose to sequester themselves with books and papers for weeks on end precisely because they enjoy and excel at interacting with the rest of humanity.

As Katharine Weber’s latest novel, Triangle, appears, she tries to imagine Edith Wharton in today’s publishing environment:

Would she send out ‘tsotsch,’ as one publicist calls it enthusiastically — pencils, say, with House of Mirth stamped in gold and a smiley face pin affixed to the end? Had she written a novel of particular interest to Jewish readers (unlikely, given her appalling references to Simeon Rosedale, but I forgive her), would she have dressed up as a giant dreidel at the Jewish Book Council reception at BEA? Would she go on The View? Would she have an Amazon Blog?

Yes, Weber decides: Wharton’s publisher would require her to have an Amazon Blog. Weber channels the Ethan Frome author below.

From Forbes.Com

New York -

In Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence, there is a character of some quality who has fallen into disrepute and who ends his days in exile in Argentina representing a large insurance company. He dies in "an odor of prosperity."

Just such an odor wafts over insurance companies. It hangs between them and the dark clouds of misfortune and blacker ones of catastrophe, providing the umbrella of capital.

From The Guardian
The author's curse

David Lodge spent three years writing and researching a biographical novel about Henry James. Then he learned that at least four other writers had been at work on similar projects. Soon he found himself caught up in a web of irony and coincidence worthy of a Jamesian plot

If anyone deserves to win this year's Man Booker Prize, it's Henry James. During 2004, he has been the originator of no fewer than three outstanding novels.

Thus began Peter Kemp's review of my novel, Author, Author, in the Sunday Times of August 29 2004, a few days before its official publication date. The other two novels to which he referred were Colm Tóibín's The Master, published in March of that year, and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, published in April. Henry James is the central character of both The Master and Author, Author. The central character of The Line of Beauty, which is set in the 1980s, is a young man who is writing a postgraduate thesis on Henry James, and Hollinghurst's novel was seen by several critics as a stylistic homage to him.

Kemp did not mention another novel about Henry James, which had been published in November 2002 and was reissued as a paperback in the spring of 2004, Emma Tennant's Felony, which spliced together an account of James's relationship with the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and a speculative retelling of the source story of his novella, The Aspern Papers. Nor did Kemp mention - probably he was not aware of its existence - yet another novel about James, by the South African writer Michiel Heyns, which was being offered to London publishers in 2004. Entitled The Typewriter's Tale, and narrated from the point of view of James's secretary, it concerned James's involvement, in the years 1907-10, in a love affair between two of his closest friends, the novelist Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton, bisexual journalist and man of letters. We know all this about a book that is still unpublished because Michiel Heyns wrote an eloquent and poignant article in Prospect magazine in September 2004 about coming last in the procession of James-inspired novelists. These were its opening words: "My agent forwards to me another polite letter of rejection: 'I am so sorry but timing is all - and there has been a spate of fiction based on the life of Henry James published here. I don't know how such coincidences happen ... something in the atmosphere? So regretfully I must say no.'"

Donors of Wharton Library Revealed (from the Buffalo News)

Anonymous no longer

For about a century, writer Edith Wharton's personal library was overseas. Now, thanks to a pair of Buffalonians, the collection has been bought and returned to The Mount, Wharton's onetime home in Lenox, Mass.

The caretakers of The Mount bought the personal library for $2.6 million from its owner in England, through the help of an anonymous, private donor, according to the Associated Press.

At a recent ceremony celebrating the collection's return, the couple's identity was revealed: Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers.

The chairman of M&T Bank and his wife, who heads Roche and Co., attended the event, whose guest list included a famous former librarian, first lady Laura Bush.

The Wilmers are longtime supporters of The Mount and have a home in the area. Four years ago, Roche and Co. sponsored the restoration and decoration of the mansion's forecourt and entrance hall.

From the Albany Capital News site:

First Lady Laura Bush visits Lenox
Updated: 4/25/2006 10:41 AM
By: Ryan Peterson

The Mount, the estate that author Edith Wharton designed and built in 1902, is in the midst of a complete restoration. One of the restoration's goals was to purchase Wharton's library and bring it back home. That goal was reached with the help of a $2.6 million donation that First Lady Laura Bush helped celebrate at a ceremony on Monday.

Mrs. Bush said, "Many of these books contain notes and editorial changes that Edith made in her early editions of her own works. Several books have inscriptions from her close friends who were historical figures in their own right, people like President Theodore Roosevelt and Henry James."

The staff at The Mount in Lenox was very excited and honored to have Mrs. Bush pay a visit. Mrs. Bush, who is a former librarian, said on national television in 2001 that Edith Wharton is one of her favorite authors.

"As a librarian and a lover of literature, I believe it's important for Americans to be able to visit the homes of our most renowned and beloved authors," she said.

From the Seattle Times: (Review of House of Mirth play running through May 13, 2006)

Classic story of woman's quest for social status

By Misha Berson

Seattle Times theater critic

"Everything about her was both vigorous and exquisite," wrote Edith Wharton of her definitive character Lily Bart.

The same can be said of actress Jennifer Lee Taylor, the captivating Lily in Book-It Repertory Theatre's "The House of Mirth."

With her fair, translucent beauty, aristocratic carriage and sleek charm, Taylor is every inch the Gilded Age enchantress Wharton described in her brilliant novel — and the ethical self-doubter, too.

Playing across Taylor's lovely face (she resembles a young Meryl Streep) are the conflicting desires that make her, ultimately, masochistic and noble. Lily attempts to both cultivate her conscience and seek her fortune in the nouveau riche piranha tank of Old New York. Alas, the two impulses turn out to be tragically incompatible.

From the Times Literary Supplement:

Isabelle de Tuyll, the prolific eighteenth-century writer who adopted the nom de guerre of Zélide and whose suitors included James Boswell and Benjamin Constant, was also rescued from oblivion by a biography with “a strong visual sense”. In 1925, following the lead of Lytton Strachey, a young architectural historian called Geoffrey Scott produced a compact, sceptical and elegantly written Portrait of Zélide. Scott underwent what Holmes calls “the classic ‘transfer experience’ of the modern biographer, starting as the detached scholar but gradually being drawn hypnotically into all the domestic details and dramas of Zélide’s world”. Part of the reason Scott was drawn in was that the story reflected his own emotional entanglements with numerous older women, including Mary Berenson, Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West, all of whom he shamelessly told were the real and secret dedicatees of his book. Holmes also believes that Scott’s book, although not exactly feminist, “changed forever the way English biographers wrote (or simply failed to write about) women. It recognized that women’s lives had different shapes from men’s, different emotional patterns of achievement and failure”.

Garrison Keillor on Edith Wharton

I have an after-dinner speech about marriage that is 15 minutes long and somewhat funny. ("The rules for marriage are the same as for a lifeboat. No sudden moves, don't crowd the other person, and keep all disastrous thoughts to yourself.") As a thrice-married guy, one feels an obligation to share such insights.

So I found myself in a cab to LaGuardia to catch a plane to Atlanta to give the speech. (I was in New York to speak at the Edith Wharton Society but not about marriage since she had a miserable one.)

[Does anyone know what event this might be? None of the EWS members I've asked know anything about it. Thanks. --Ed. ]

From the Seattle Times:

From page to stage, trying to capture Edith Wharton's Lily

By Misha Berson


Lily Bart, an alluring and eligible woman of 29, is a glittering ornament of the Manhattan "smart set" who catches many a male mogul's wandering eye.

But Lily is no mere "It Girl" of the Gilded Age. She is, in fact, one of the most complicated of American literary protagonists. Ambitious and ambivalent, vain and virtuous, torn and ultimately tragic, she is often a puzzle — to herself, and to others.

Given Lily's beauty and charm, why does happiness escape her? And why, given all her rich admirers, does she end up poor and alone?

Lily's psychological intricacy, in relation to the rigid social strata she inhabits, make Edith Wharton's 1905 book, "The House of Mirth," one of the finest of American novels — and among the hardest to stage or film.

Yet "The House of Mirth" devotees can still dream that Lily's glittering, perilous saga in Old New York will someday translate into satisfying drama.

That hope rises again, with the arrival of a new stage adaptation by British writer Marcus Goodwin. Produced by Book-It Repertory Theatre, and staged by artistic director Jane Jones, it opens Friday at Seattle's Center House Theatre, with gifted actress Jennifer Lee Taylor as Lily.
. . .
Coming up

"The House of Mirth," produced by Book-It Repertory Theatre, previews begin Tuesday, opens Friday and runs through May 13 at Center House Theatre, Seattle Center; $15-$30 (206-216-0833 or www.book-it.org).

From the Mercury News:

Within a few months, I had all the books in hand and had mapped my strategy. Along with each winning work, I would read at least one other book by the author and his or her biography, study criticism and view any film versions. This was going to be a gourmet reading experience.

Speed bump No. 2: Most of the first 10 Pulitzer Prize winners were abysmal. The jurors had lapsed into good taste only once, when they chose Edith Wharton's ``The Age of Innocence.''

Speed bump No. 3: Life and news intervened. On election night 2000, I sat in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hotel room perusing ``Scarlet Sister Mary'' and faced facts. After months of reading and research, I had made it only as far as 1929. The Bush-Gore drama unfolding on television was a whole lot more interesting. I flew back to online news work in Atlanta and put aside the project for 4 1/2 years.

. . . . .
Some books were impossible to read without the main character's metamorphosing into the actor in the movie role. In my mind's eye, Atticus Finch was indistinguishable from Gregory Peck, Newland Archer conjured up Jeremy Irons and Oprah Winfrey was Sethe. It was a reminder that we bring all our experiences to reading.

[Ed. question: When did Jeremy Irons play Newland Archer?]

Buccaneers Miniseries now on DVD

`The Buccaneers' miniseries gets better with age
By R.D. Heldenfels
Akron Beacon Journal

DVD pick of week: When The Buccaneers aired on Masterpiece Theatre in 1995, I called it "a wonderful story of money and class, romantic love and marriages of convenience, of England and the United States."

More than a decade later, the DVD (BBC Video, five parts on one two-sided disc, $14.98) found me liking it even more.

Based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel, the miniseries involved young women trying to succeed in London society after failing to make a dent in America's upper crust.

From InsideBayArea.com (San Francisco)

The Wharton One-Acts" — Valley Shakespeare Festival presents the West Coast premiere of two stage adaptations of Edith Wharton's stories "The Mission of Jane" and "The Promise." Closes Sunday,April 16 at Downtown Yoga, 220-B Division St., Pleasanton. 8 p.m. today and Saturday; 4 p.m. Sunday. $20-$25. (925) 606-6468; http://www.valleyshakes.org.

From Scotsman.com

When the TV companies wheel in experts to talk in hushed tones about art, I rush down to galleries and slash canvases. Not really. Galleries are always closed by that time of night. My favourite buttock-clencher in last night's The Private Life Of An Easter Masterpiece was "The Last Supper creates who we are." That leaves our mothers and fathers out of the picture then. But, luckily, the American novelist Edith Wharton was remembered as keeping it real by saying: "Ever since I first saw that painting I wanted to bash it in the face."

Ethan Frome: An American Romance – a new musical based on the classic 1911 novella by Edith Wharton – will receive its first staged reading at The York Theatre on Tuesday, May 9th at 3 PM and 7:30 PM.

. . .

The York Theatre at St Peter’s is located at 54th St. just east of Lexington Ave. For further information, call 212-935-5820 or visit www.yorktheatre.org.

The House of Mirth Closes Book-It's Season (Broadway World)
http://broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=8780
Lily Bart, the lovely, impoverished and stubbornly single heroine of Edith Wharton's 1905 dark bestseller The House of Mirth, is a character destined for disappointment. Trapped in a society where women are "brought up to be ornamental," she's torn between her desire for a carefree gilded existence and her desire for the unthinkable: a marriage based on love. And unfortunately, at age 29, her shelf life is about to expire. Lily's plight is the heart of Wharton's scathing account of high society, The House of Mirth, which runs April 20 -May 13 at Book-It Repertory Theatre's Center House Theatre.

Adapted by Marcus Goodwin and directed by Jane Jones, The House of Mirth is set in the Gilded Age of 1905 New York, a world of great wealth, great poverty, and more than anything else, great greed.

"The culture that Edith Wharton writes about is very nouveau riche," says Jane Jones, director. "They don't have the experience or grace of knowing how to be rich, of how to act, or how to treat people. There's a lot of measuring up, a ton of greed. They basically eat each other alive. People are terrified of what might happen to them, because things are changing so incredibly fast. Everyone is very guarded about their money and yet they flaunt it shamelessly. They're consumers, in all senses of the word."

Lily Bart is only too aware of her own status as a hot commodity. But her vanity is only one of her fatal flaws. Her naiveté also plays a part in her slow spiral down, as does society's penchant for celebrating and then denigrating its "chosen ones".

"Lily Bart is a celebrity because of her great beauty," says Jones."She's put on this pedestal, but the pedestal is actually a gilded cage; she has no freedom. And unfortunately, once you're on that pedestal, there's only one place to go and that's down. For whatever reason, as a society we celebrate that. Just look at the tabloids where you can read about Jennifer Aniston losing her husband or Lindsey Lohan's drug addiction because she didn't know how to deal with fame and money."

Does that mean Lily Bart is essentially the Jennifer Anniston or Lindsey Lohan of her day?

"Lily Bart is no different,' says Jones. "She's gotten herself into debt through her gambling addiction and she's also addicted to the high life. She's naïve and ignorant as to what the cost of fame and celebrity is, of what it costs to stay in that circle. And if you look at the rich now, nothing's changed. Living in that world costs, sometimes it costs your life."

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/98681.html

Age of Innocence, 1928 Dramatization of Wharton Novel, Gets NYC Reading March 27

By Kenneth Jones
27 Mar 2006

The Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning Mint Theater Company will continue its season dedicated to neglected plays by American women by presenting a staged reading of Margaret Ayer Barnes' 1928 and seldom-seen dramatization, The Age of Innocence, based on the novel by Edith Wharton.

The March 27 event is a benefit for the not-for-profit Mint company in Manhattan.

Barnes' dramatization played for over 200 Broadway performances in 1928 with Katharine Cornell playing Madame Olenska. Rollo Peters played Newland Archer. Cornell then toured the country in the role.

Stuart Howard will direct a cast of 11 that includes Jennifer Harmon, Darrie Lawrence, Claire Lautier, Michael Littig, Sal Mistretta, Dennis Parlato, Derek Smith, Samantha Soule, Molly Stuart, Jeff Talbott and Gregory Wooddell.
* * * * * *
Attend the reading only or plan to have dinner at Le Madeline before the show with Mint artistic director Jonathan Bank and special guest Linda Costanzo Cahir, co-editor of The Edith Wharton Review, to discuss Wharton and Barnes and to hear some fun backstage gossip from the Broadway production starring Katharine Cornell.
* * * * * *
Tickets for the reading at 7:30 PM are $25; tickets for the reading and dinner at Le Madeline (which begins at 5:30 PM) are $85 and either may be purchased by calling (212) 315-0231 or at www.minttheater.org.

Mint Theater is located on the Third Floor of 311 West 43rd Street. Performances of Soldier's Wife continue to April 2. Tickets for the remaining performances of Soldier's Wife are $45 and are available by calling (212) 315-0231 or online at www.minttheater.org.

From The New York Sun
Us Weekly, c. 1895
Books

By KATE TAYLOR
January 9, 2006


If you have a taste for celebrity biography but find more allure in the names Astor and Vanderbilt than Hilton and Weinstein, you will enjoy Amanda Mackenzie Stuart's "Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and Mother in the Gilded Age" (HarperCollins, 608 pages, $27.95). If, on the other hand, you are looking for a sensitive evocation of this milieu not drawn largely from the social headlines of contemporary newspapers, you would do better to pick up Edith Wharton's unfinished novel "The Buccaneers," itself based on the life of Consuelo Vanderbilt. Indeed, you would do better to pick up any Edith Wharton at all - finished or not

A Different Affair

Merchant's House Museum to Host Gala 19th-Century Dinner at Historic India House in Lower Manhattan Multi-course Dinner to Feature Haute Cuisine Evoking the Gilded Era of the Astors and the Vanderbilts.

January 5, 2006: The Merchant's House Museum announced today that Kitty Carlisle Hart, Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler Chapin, and Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Hardy are serving as Honorary Co-Chairs of a Gala Benefit for the Museum to be held in New York on Thursday, March 16, 2006.

Inspired by a passage from Edith Wharton's classic novel, The Age of Innocence, the Museum's A Different Affair Gala will feature a sumptuous 19th-century dinner recreating the atmosphere and enchantment of Old New York. As Wharton wrote:

"But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with Roman punch, roses from Henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair, and not to be lightly undertaken. As Mrs. Archer remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference, not in itself but by its manifold implications--since it signified either canvas-backs or terrapin, two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full décolletage with short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance."

The setting the dinner will be the magnificent 1924 ballroom at historic India House on Hanover Square, with its oval skylight designed by master architects Delano & Aldrich. Eberhard Müller, renowned chef at Bayard's, and former top toque at Lutèce, will create the historically correct and elegant multi-course menu for the occasion complete with Roman punch. Guests will be encouraged to attend the event in 19th-century dress.

Proceeds from A Different Affair will benefit the Merchant House Museum s Restoration, Collections Conservation, and Public Education Programs. Built in 1832, the Merchant s House is New York City s only family home preserved intact, inside and out, from the 19th century, and is the City's prime example of a Greek Revival townhouse.

Home to a prosperous merchant family for almost 100 years -- and complete with its original furniture, decorative arts, and personal memorabilia -- the Merchant s House offers an intimate and authentic glimpse of domestic life of a wealthy family during the period when New York was transforming from a colonial seaport to a thriving metropolis.

The Merchant's House is one of only 2,000 sites designated as a National Historic Landmark and has been given landmark status in New York City for its late-Federal brick exterior as well as for its Greek Revival interiors. The House is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Tickets for this historic event range from $400 to $1,000 and can be reserved by telephoning the Museum at 212-777-1089. A portion of each ticket purchased is tax-deductible.

Merchant's House Museum
29 East Fourth Street
New York, NY 10003-7003



Telephone 212-777-1089
Fax 212-777-1104
Email pi@merchanthouse.org

www.merchantshouse.org
Submitted by: Shay Pantano, shay@merchanthsoue.com

Edith Wharton's Library (press release from The Mount)
http://www.edithwharton.org/about/4.php?record=23
. . . . . .
In addition to containing 22 copies of her own works, some of the more important first editions in the collection according to independent appraisers include:

* Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1866, first American edition) 1,000 copies printed. Wharton recalled that as a child she knew Alice “by heart.”
* The Golden Bowl by Henry James, signed by the author: “To Edith Wharton – in sympathy – Henry James, November 1904.” There are more than 25 works by James in the library including Terminations, Embarrassments, and Wings of the Dove, chronicling their long and intimate friendship.
* Ulysses by James Joyce. This is one of 750 copies published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in 1922.
* America and the World War by Theodore Roosevelt, 1915. Inscribed: “To Edith Wharton from an American – American! Theodore Roosevelt Feb 6th 1915.”
* The Education of Henry Adams (Privately printed for the author), 1907. Edition of 100 copies.

Sets of books from her father’s library, including his two-volume set of Milton, were joined by the poets she loved, including Arnold, Browning, Coleridge, Donne, Hopkins, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, and three volumes of Walt Whitman, a personal favorite.

Essentially self-educated, she was fluent in French, German, and Italian, and collected classical literature in translation. She revered the works of Goethe and read all his poetry by the age of fifteen. Works by Italian writers including Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Dante, and Leopardi were side by side on her shelves with French masters Racine, Pascal, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust.
. . . . . .

http://www.edithwharton.org/about/4.php?record=23

From the New York Times(free registration required)

December 15, 2005
After a Century, an American Writer's Library Will Go to America
By ALAN COWELL


SETTRINGTON, England, Dec. 12 - In an English house in this small Yorkshire village, a defining moment in American letters unfolded on Monday, rounding a circle begun a century ago when Edith Wharton, the writer, packed up and left the United States to live in France.

With a toast of Champagne and a lunch of roast pheasant (shot by the host himself), George Ramsden, a British bookseller in a pinstripe suit, signed a $2.6 million agreement to sell the 2,600-volume Edith Wharton library to the custodians of the Mount, the writer's estate in Lenox, Mass., which she designed, built and finally left forever in 1911 as her marriage unraveled.

"It is the most important acquisition we could possibly make," Stephanie Copeland, head of the Mount's restoration project, said in an interview just before she signed the deal.

The sale ended a remarkable period of uncertainty, not just for the future of the collection and the keepers of the Mount but also for Mr. Ramsden, who bought the bulk of the library in 1984 for £45,000, then worth around $80,000, and has devoted much of his life to completing and cataloguing it.

The library has rarely been on public view since the writer's death in France in 1937, and its return to the Mount will provide scholars and Wharton aficionados with an opportunity to view the volumes that not only shaped Wharton's development but also reflected the broad sweep of her interests, from classical French theater and German drama to the novels of her peers and the delights of the then new-fangled automobile.

Annotations in the volumes offer a window into her world. There is an inscribed volume from Morton Fullerton, her journalist lover in Paris, said by scholars to have been Wharton's most significant romantic partner. He dedicated a copy of "Problems of Power," a study in international politics, to "Edith Wharton, but for whom this book would never have been written." Theodore Roosevelt inscribed a copy of his 1915 "America and the World War" with the words: "To Edith Wharton from an American-American!" And there are, of course, books signed by Henry James, which throw some oblique light into the deep friendship she maintained with him. ("To Edith Wharton - in sympathy," James wrote in "The Golden Bowl" in 1904).

Hermione Lee, a prominent scholar at Oxford University, who is preparing a new Wharton biography, called the library "a form of writer's autobiography" in the 1998 foreword of a catalog of the collection prepared by Mr. Ramsden.

"Her whole social milieu, her private affairs and her literary career can be discerned from her collection," Ms. Lee wrote. "Wharton's flyleaves show her progression from Edith Jones to Mrs. Edward Wharton to Edith Wharton, as she turns herself from a society girl into the much-admired and somewhat daunting internationally famous author."

The setting for the sale at Mr. Ramsden's home near York - the house, dating to 1716, is called the Old Rectory - was hardly the opulent world of old New York depicted by Wharton in many of her novels. There were no footmen or bejeweled grandes dames (though there was, fittingly, an English lord). There were none of the couches and opulent paneling of the original library at the Mount, which Wharton moved into in 1902.

Indeed, the sale itself was part of a more complex - and strictly modern - financial transaction. The purchase of the library, Ms. Copeland said, was financed by a loan from an anonymous benefactor, whom she would identify only as a businessman.

Once the library is reinstalled at the Mount, in the original library on the first floor, Wharton admirers will be encouraged to "adopt" a book for a set price. The most expensive at $1 million, Ms. Copeland said, will be Wharton's copy of "The Decoration of Houses" - the first work of prose published under her name in 1897, with her co-author, Ogden Codman Jr.

Lesser titles will be available for adoption for as little as $1,000. The aim is to pay back the purchase price and create a $35 million restoration fund for the Mount, Ms. Copeland said.

How Edith Wharton's characters from upper-crust Old New York might have shivered at such public discussion of money!

For many years, the sale had been at an impasse. Mr. Ramsden was ready to sell, but the Mount had no money to buy, Ms. Copeland said. Only a series of apparent coincidences last year and earlier this year undid the deadlock. But that was after the collection had already endured many vicissitudes.

After Wharton's death in 1937, the library was split and part was destroyed in storage in London during the World War II. The rest was inherited by Colin Clark, the son of the British historian Sir Kenneth Clark and Wharton's godson. That part was integrated into Kenneth Clark's own library at Saltwood Castle in Kent, in southern England. The Clark family sold the collection and Mr. Ramsden bought the library from Maggs, a prominent London bookseller, in 1984, but it was incomplete and he spent many years revisiting Saltwood to look for missing volumes and buying other books to complete the library. (Alan Clark, Sir Kenneth's other son, told him his quest for missing books at Saltwood was "admirable but a thundering nuisance," Mr. Ramsden said.)

"The unique thing about this library is that she wrote about it in her autobiography," Mr. Ramsden said. "She really tells you what books really meant to her. Even before she could read, she could be found alone with a book upside down in her hands. The physical presence of books continued to mean a lot to her.

[ . . . ]

Submitted by Frederick Wegener.

From The New Yorker, February 1936 (Talk of the Town), during the run of Ethan Frome on Broadway:

We caught our cold in the National Theatre, waiting at the top of the coasting hill for Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver to start their long, sad descent. The chill which we took was brought on when we observed the remarkable manner in which these two grief-sprent lovers arranged themselves on the sled. Instead of sitting up, clutching each other (as Mrs. Wharton specified), or lying down belly-whoppers (a conceivable alternative), they startled everybody by reclining side by side on the sled, in the sort of classic semi-recumbent pose which we once saw Raymond Duncan take before a group of ladies. It is clear to us now why the Ethan and Mattie of the play didn't die. They didn't die because they most certainly fell off the sled near the top of the hill and never got within a mile of the old elm at the bottom. Not even Donna Fox could have fetched the elm that way, much less Raymond Massey.

# 22 November. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will air the 1934 version of The Age of Innocence on December 6 and 20. This version is not available on VHS or DVD.

From Slate on Maureen Dowd (http://www.slate.com/id/2129290/?nav=navoa)

One of Dowd's many admirers extravagantly compared her to Edith Wharton. But Wharton was among the first female writers to write about the single woman's ambivalence toward marriage. What is maddening about Dowd's book—and the excerpt in the Times Magazine—is that she does not develop her ideas, that she does not push beneath the surface. One wishes that, instead of devoting herself to zinginess, to ripostes and one-liners, she would use her threatening intelligence to unearth the deeper complexities of her subject. Is there something about the generation of women who came of age in the late 1960s—in male-dominated universities and workplaces—that finds its own power problematic? Why is it that so many women are taking refuge in outdated visions of femininity?

From "Edith Wharton and the War on Terror" by Garrison Keillor
(Submitted by EWS members)

. . .

There is no fighting these boondoggles and politicians know it. The stuff gets passed and signed into law and taxpayer groups fire off a barrage of press releases and a week later it's old news. The sensible thing is to fight for your own boondoggle.

I belong to an enormous special-interest group that, unlike Alaskans or hobby pilots, has never exercised much clout, and that is the English-major community. For us, the equivalent of the Gravina Island bridge is the public library equipped with leather sofas and an espresso bar and librarians who are trained in pressure-point massage. Greek columns would be nice, and a pair of stone lions, and a rare book collection and a three-story lobby with marble floors so your footsteps echo as if you were in an Edith Wharton novel. And a statue of Minerva.

I imagine that a super-library of that caliber might cost $223 million if you add in the books, the banks of computers with high-speed Internet connections, the movie theater, the Children's Room, the Steam Room, the Nap Room, the Hobnob Room where English majors can gather for a libation, the underground parking garage, and the kindly reference librarian with the bun, the faint moustache on the upper lip, the navy-blue knit dress, the sensible shoes, and the glasses on a chain around her neck. Those ladies have become rare and do not come cheap.

We English majors need a mouthpiece in Congress of the caliber of Rep. Don Young of Alaska. And we need to promote public libraries as a tool in the war against terror.

How many readers of Edith Wharton have engaged in terroristic acts? I challenge you to name one. Therefore, the reading of Edith Wharton is a proven deterrent to terror. Do we need to wait until our cities lie in smoking ruins before we wake up to the fact that a first-class public library is a vital link in national defense?

Which side is your congressman on? If we English majors would make our voices heard and flood Congress with angry sonnets, we would get a major library bill passed. I hope that Minnesota will get the first $223 million library, but if Ketchikan wants one too, fine.

From Jonathan Bank of the Mint Theater Company:

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A VERY SPECIAL EVENT!
Monday, October 17th at 7:30
Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the publication of
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

Join us for a reading of the Edith Wharton/Clyde Fitch dramatization of Wharton’s novel, as adapted by Jonathan Bank.

Edith Wharton joined with “the playwright of the hour in America” Clyde Fitch to dramatize her first great success. The result played on Broadway for only two weeks in 1906—but the Mint production in 1998 was a great success. Artistic Director Jonathan Bank revised the original text using material from the novel.

Attend the reading only or plan to have dinner before the show with adapter/director Jonathan Bank and hear the story of how Wharton and Clyde Fitch were brought together in the first place and learn about the fascinating changes Wharton made to her original story and why.

Tickets for the reading only: $25
Tickets for dinner (location TBA), discussion and reading: $85

All proceeds to benefit Mint Theater Company
311 West 43rd St, 3rd floor
NY, NY 10036

Box office: 212-315-0231
Or visit our website: http://www.minttheater.org/onstage/next.html

Prof (Alan Price) found PSU Hazleton perfect

From MSNBC.com http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9025267/

Prof found PSU Hazleton perfect
By Craig Eisenberger
The Standard-Speaker

*********
While teaching, Price conducted literary research. Two writers stuck out in his mind during his time in college, Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton. Researching Wharton led him across the country and the world, looking at manuscripts and other documents.
Looking through Wharton's papers, Price came across photos of children. Now he found this odd since she divorced her husband in 1913 and had no children. "I was wondering where these kids are from," Price said. "I'm nosy and that kind of curiosity is necessary for an academic researcher."
"What I found out was that she ran a refugee organization responsible for saving thousands of people at the same time she was writing novels."
That led him to write The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War. "I wrote about her World War I work, as a novelist but mostly as a humanitarian."
It took 20 years to get everything together and finally write the book. "The New York Times gave it a good review," Price recalled.
While other Americans were fleeing Paris because of the impending German invasion through Belgium, Wharton stayed to help the children. However, she was not alone.
"When you write big projects there is always something left over," Price said.
During his time researching Wharton's efforts to assist refuges, he came across 200 other organizations run by American women in France and Belgium, which were later consolidated by the Red Cross.
"I didn't get to talk about those organizations," he said.
The workers in France faced miserable conditions, Price said. "These were noble efforts and they are gone as if they evaporated." He feels that he may return to this topic one day.

Age of Innocence (1934 version) on Turner Classic Movies.

The 1934 version of The Age of Innocence will run on the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) channel on Thursday, August 18, at noon Eastern Daylight Time (9 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time). This version is not available on VHS or DVD, and it is only rarely shown on television.

Home truths
The Back Half
Stephen Bayley
Monday 15th August 2005
From The New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/200508150028

The interior-design craze was fuelled by the publication of The Decoration of Houses, by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, in 1897. The book was a significant influence on Elsie de Wolfe, the inventor of the modern profession. A social-climbing lesbian, she is the spiritual ancestor of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. With her cheerful motto "plenty of optimism and white paint", de Wolfe introduced new American money to old French furniture when, one day in 1913, she unloaded $3m-worth of cabriole-legged stuff on to Henry Clay Frick. For years afterwards, possession of French furniture was a token of status. In her novel The Custom of the Country (1913), Wharton parodied this affected Francophilia and coined the useful term "Looey". As late as 1950 - when, remember, the abstract expressionists were already at work - the decorator Billy Baldwin was still telling students at the Parsons School of Design in New York that all they really needed was a perfect pair of "Looey XVI" console tables and life, hitherto unsatisfactory, would be complete.

A writer's other great passion, restored
Edith Wharton's garden reblooms

By Carol Stocker, Globe Staff | August 11, 2005

LENOX -- The mistress had a corner bedroom so she could look down on her flower garden while writing longhand in bed. This she did each day from about 6 a.m. to noon, often with a dog propped under one arm as she dropped each completed page on the floor to be collected by her maid and typed by her secretary.

This was how Edith Wharton wrote ''The House of Mirth" at The Mount, her vacation home in the Berkshires, 100 summers ago. Her novel about Lily Bart, a sincere and vulnerable young woman destroyed by the hypocrisy of high society, became a record-breaking bestseller and gave Wharton the confidence to pursue a career as a writer.

To celebrate the centennial of Wharton's first literary masterpiece, her beloved flower garden was replanted at The Mount this June through a $500,000 grant from an anonymous Boston foundation.

''You don't often get a chance to plant a 3,000-perennial garden in this day and age. It's very exciting," said Susan Child of Boston, who designed the garden with former associate M. Christopher Alonso.

The magnificent garden looks like it was planted years ago. Hundreds of fragrant lilies, old-fashioned mignonettes, and stately delphiniums recreate the luxurious abundance that hallmarked the Gilded Age. The color scheme is sparkling white, vivid blue, and deep purple with bright splashes of pink from the garden phlox that Wharton especially loved.

Tall filigree thalictrum and filipendula contribute the airy effect that Wharton sought in defiance of her era's convention of compact and regimented plants. Asters and fall-blooming anemones are among the many flowers designed to carry the garden through October, when The Mount closes for the season. The four large rectangular borders enclose a rebuilt fountain. Child describes the scene as ''exuberance within the confines of rigor."

The flower garden is the climax of a $35 million restoration project that has brought The Mount back from the brink of collapse. ''This garden is the crown jewel of the entire restoration project," said project manager David Andersen. ''The flowers cost $150,000. But it cost four times that for the layers upon layers of work in this garden that people never see, such as the archeology, the engineering, and the irrigation."

Wharton often spent her afternoons gardening. Despite 10 live-in gardeners and groundskeepers, she liked to get her hands dirty, said Child, ''something women of her class never did." Though her childless marriage proved unfortunate, Wharton lived a very full life here, entertaining her friends and managing an elegant ''great house" with 35 rooms and a staff of 20.

From the Poughkeepsie Journal

Mansion starred in classic tale
Staatsburgh part of Wharton's 'House of Mirth'
By Angela Batchelor

It is her first novel, however, 1905's "House of Mirth," that has a connection to the Staatsburgh State Historic Site in Staatsburg. The novel, serialized by Scribner's Magazine, became a best-seller and has become a classic.

Many believe the country estate described in Wharton's novel, Bellomont, was based on Staatsburgh, the Dutchess County mansion owned by Ogden and Ruth Livingston Mills.

Special tours

To honor the centennial of the publication of Wharton's book, Staatsburgh State Historic Site is offering special "House of Mirth" tours the first Sunday of every month through October. Tours begin at 3 p.m.

"The 100th anniversary of the novel is important," said Julie Olin-Ammentorp, a member of the Edith Wharton Society. " 'House' has such an important place in American literature. It is an amazingly accomplished novel. Wharton's characters, plot and literary style are all impressive."

Land's End in Newport
From Washington Lifein September 2002. The original article is here http://www.washingtonlife.com/backissues/archives/02sept/newport.htm and includes a picture of the house as it stands today.

Rumor has it that Edith Wharton purchased the remote property at the southern end of Ledge Road because she wanted to live as far as possible from her mother without leaving Newport. . . .

In 1897 Edith Wharton purchased Land's End from Robert Livingston Beeckman, a former U.S. Open Tennis Championship runner-up who would go on to become Governor of Rhode Island. At that time Wharton described the main house as "incurably ugly." She agreed to pay $80,000 for the property, and spend thousands more to alter the home's facade, decorate the interior, and landscape the grounds. Ultimately, Wharton would allow that she and Ogden Codman, Jr., a revivalist architect who supervised the renovations, had finally helped the home achieve "a certain dignity." The newly constructed gardens were especially impressive having been laid-out in classical design by Beatrix Ferrand, the landscape architect responsible for the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks.

From The Literary Almanac for June 29, 2005:

It was on this day in 1921, Edith Wharton (books by this author) became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence, which opens, "On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York."

Submitted by Emily Orlando

Edith Wharton's grave

I live in Paris and have been to Edith Wharton's grave in Versailles.
It was unkempt, unoticeable if it was not for a competent cemetery guardian.
It cannot be identified, the inscription on her grave is unleadgible etc...
Something must be done. I will make myself avaiblable to anyone who is willing to do something!

Sophie Latraverse
sadral@yahoo.fr

A Drawing-Room of Their Own from The New York Times
(free registration required)
[. . . ] The Causeries du Lundi - the name, which means Monday chatterings, was taken from Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve's weekly literary column in a 19th-century Parisian newspaper - is one of the oldest women's literary societies in the country. It is both a relic of a vanishing New York and a poignant reflection of the lives women have led over the past century and a quarter.

Nearly continuously for 125 years, this extremely private and exclusive group has gathered at a member's home almost always on the first Monday of every month during the New York social season, from November to May, to read aloud essays that members have written on topics that interest them. [. . . ]

The surnames of early Causeries members read like a Baedeker of Edith Wharton's New York: Roosevelt, Delafield, Lefferts, Huntington, Van Cortlandt, Beekman, Van Rensselaer. One story passed down through the years is that many early members were wives of men who had helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wanted something to do for themselves.

Literary Map of New York City

This interactive map of New York by the New York Times includes a quotation from The Age of Innocence.http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/20050605_BOOKMAP_GRAPHIC/

From L.A. Weekly:
The co-publishers of L.A.’s newest press, Bük, are relying on those unlikely literary venues to revive Paine’s unlikely literary form, the pamphlet. Neither a book nor a magazine, Bük comes in 16- and 32-page formats that showcase exactly one piece of writing: an Edith Wharton short story, a Jonathan Swift essay or a collection of Lynn Davis photographs, for instance.

From the Berkshire Eagle:
Wharton novel topic of exhibit

LENOX -- "Lily's Downfall," a collaborative exhibit with the Museum of the City of New York, will open to the public at The Mount on Sunday. The exhibit celebrates the centennial of "The House of Mirth," Edith Wharton's first bestseller, by bringing the novel to life in the house where it was created.
Designed by former Yale Repertory Artistic Director Stanley Wojewodski Jr., the exhibit features six tableaux depicting key moments in the tragic downfall of the novel's heroine. The tableaux showcases historic Gilded Age costumes from the Museum of the City of New York's extensive collection.

Visitors can see a range of period clothing and accessories, from delicate lingerie to a rare deep mourning dress. The items are more than 100 years old and were worn by women from Wharton's era.

From the Weekend Standard (China):

The only film of the three that works, on its own and as part of the trilogy's larger thematic aim, is Wong Kar-wai's The Hand, a lush, elegant, quietly erotic parable starring Gong Li and Chang Chen. The sublime Gong plays a courtesan in 1960s Hong Kong who hires a tailor (Chang) to be her personal dressmaker after securing his loyalty with a sexual gesture that manages to be as bold as it is discreet. As the relationship between the two changes with their twisting fortunes, The Hand takes on the tragic grandeur of Edith Wharton at her most politely ruthless.

May 1st 2005; Sunday NYTimes Book Review, p. 31

"We'll Map Manhattan," by Randy Cohen

Randy Cohen proposes "to create, with the help of the Book Review's readers, a literary map of --not of its authors' haunts but those of their characters..."

Lily Bart's walk up Fifth Avenue toward Lawrence Selden's apartment in the Benedick is prominently featured in this essay, which provides both a map and the following quotation from THE HOUSE OF MIRTH:

"As she reached 50th Street...she decided to walk across to Madison Avenue." She notices "the Georgian flathouse with flowerboxes on its balconies...A few yards ahead was the doorway they had entered together."

Submitted by Deborah Hecht, hechtd@tourolaw.edu

From the Berkshire Eagle (includes pictures)

LENOX -- Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. is expected to be honored in a White House ceremony by President Bush for its restoration and preservation of The Mount.

The Mount, author Edith Wharton's Lenox estate. Photos by Ben Garver / Berkshire Eagle Staff


The Mount and three other preservation sites and programs -- the Texas Heritage Trails Program, a statewide initiative; Bolduc Historic Property of Sainte Genevieve, Mo., and the Isaiah Davenport House Museum of Savannah, Ga. -- are expected to receive awards, said Bruce Milhans, spokesman for the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

"[The Mount] is very significant from a cultural perspective and a literary perspective," said Milhans. "It has become a very significant draw not only for heritage tourism, but also as an educational program. It was an absolute save."

The Fatherless Children of France Exhibit (Wharton items at Holy Cross)

Currently on display on the second floor of Dinand Library, The Fatherless Children of France: “Their Book” exhibit is a rare event. Given to the College by Mrs. David Johnson in 1953, the collection was a gift in memory of her husband, who from 1891-1893 attended the Holy Cross Preparatory School, which was affiliated with the College until 1909. The collection contains autographed messages, manuscripts, photographs and artwork from the greatest political and military leaders, writers and artists of the World War I era. The items were originally assembled for a fund-raising auction to benefit the Fatherless Children of France Society, an organization founded in 1915 by American women to help French war orphans.

The auction items range from autographed poems by Robert Frost and Edith Wharton, to a 1918 autographed musical score for “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” by John Phillips Sousa . . .

From The Age (Australia):

To maintain the rigid status quo of high society New York, sacrifices must be made and rebellion punished. By Avril Moore.

The EROTICISM represented by the perpetually blooming red flowers overlaying the lace and perfect copperplate in the title sequence of The Age of Innocence conveys the film's main theme: old-world values colliding with the new.

And yet if May Welland epitomises the strict adherence of the New York aristocracy to what was socially acceptable for the time, then the irony of the title cannot be lost.

For here, as in the novel by Edith Wharton from which the film is faithfully derived, is a world where the intransigent preservation of wealth and power is paramount, and any whiff of individualism must be sacrificed, if not eradicated.

This tension, or outright hostility, exists beneath a brittle veneer of impeccable manners, taste and morality - a harmony shattered by a whisper and a subterfuge so sophisticated that it warrants decoding by an arch, third-person narrator.

Screenwriter and director Martin Scorsese said the narrator was a "tricky" character. The narrator "presents the story in this way to teach us a lesson".

"I love the idea of the female voice setting us up for a fall. You get to trust her, and then she does you in, just like he (Newland Archer) gets done in," he said. [. . . ]

The New York Times Magazine
March 13, 2005
Interview with Meireille Guiliano (by Edward Lewine, p. 28-29)

"Best book she read recently:

It is called, "True Pleasures: A Memoir of women in Paris. Actually, it was written by an Australian named Lucinda Holdforth. I connect to it because she talks about great women in Paris like Colette, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, but also because she visits the neighborhood where I live there."
--Submitted by Deborah Hecht