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The Edith Wharton Essay Prize is awarded annually for the best unpublished essay on Edith Wharton by a beginning scholar.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."