Book contents
- The New Edith Wharton Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Edith Wharton Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Editions and Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Self and Composition
- Chapter 1 Creative Process and Literary Form in Edith Wharton’s Archive
- Chapter 2 Wharton’s Letters: Glimpses of the Whole Edith Wharton
- Chapter 3 Edith Wharton and the Business of the Magazine Short Story
- Part II International Wharton
- Part III Wharton on the Margins
- Part IV Sex and Gender Revisited
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Wharton’s Letters: Glimpses of the Whole Edith Wharton
from Part I - Self and Composition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2019
- The New Edith Wharton Studies
- Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions
- The New Edith Wharton Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Editions and Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Self and Composition
- Chapter 1 Creative Process and Literary Form in Edith Wharton’s Archive
- Chapter 2 Wharton’s Letters: Glimpses of the Whole Edith Wharton
- Chapter 3 Edith Wharton and the Business of the Magazine Short Story
- Part II International Wharton
- Part III Wharton on the Margins
- Part IV Sex and Gender Revisited
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Edith Wharton’s personal letters have become integral to an understanding of Wharton’s life and literary production. Because of elements central to most academic projects, however, scholars are rarely able to embrace the many and varied aspects of Wharton which her letters reveal. Re-examining the letters offers a gallery of newly detailed Whartons, including the athletic teenager and happy new wife, the author who sometimes expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and classist views, and the world traveler who was domestically homey. Further, the letters demonstrate their own importance in her life: they were the means through which she maintained friendships (including those with the Berensons and with Gaillard Lapsley) that were vital to her emotional well-being. The letters reveal Wharton creating literary masterpieces and getting through the challenges of history and of everyday existence; they also demonstrate her thorough literariness, inventiveness, and humor. The re-examined personal letters offer a complex, contradictory, irreducible Wharton.
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- The New Edith Wharton Studies , pp. 32 - 47Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019