This book is amazing! It is a Wharton fan's dream! I was kindly sent this book by my dear friend in America and it has proved invaluable. As an English student, I will be writing my dissertation on the life and major works of this fantastic author, and this is exactly the kind of publication that will make the whole process not only easier, but enjoyable!

This is an excellent guide for Wharton fans and scholars alike. It comes with my full reccomendation! Whether reading for pleasure or for academic purposes, it is a remarkable book.

Dude, this book is cool. its, like, really interesting and stuff and it makes me wanna go to italy. i bet italy is pretty cool from the descriptions. but thats just what i think, and i dont do it that often really. Hey, e-mail me if you have suggestions of good books or anything really. Bye!!

This beautifully illustrated book is of the "coffeetable" variety but that moniker fails to do justice for this incredible look into the life of the brillant novelist. Scores of rare photos and documents illustrate the best text I have ever read on the private life of Ms. Wharton. This is definately not the "ice queen" of other biographers; reproduced postcards and quoted letters give graphic proof of her warm and witty personality . She was clearly blessed with a remarkable capacity for friendship and unending thirst for knowledge and experiences. This is truly the finest biography ever written on the legendary lady of letters. I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to own this volume, it proudly sits on my shelf alongside Ms. Wharton's own works. An absolute must for any reference library on Wharton!!!

In this masterful work of literary criticism, Killoran deftly opens new doors to Wharton studies. Eschewing faddish critical schools, Killoran reads between the lines to paint an original, psychologically complex work that takes us well beyond R.W.B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolfe and leads us to conclude that Wharton, rather than just a novelist of manners or a disciple of Henry James, stands apart from her peers and heralds a new, post-Freudian American literature.

This delightful little volume is a compilation of articles written for American troops bound for France in World War One. While their effect on the average doughboy may be questionable, they give a powerful and invaluable insight into one of the most perceptive minds of the age.
Wharton, in her most engaging and always readable style, discusses First Impressions, and examines issues of Reverence, Taste, Intellectual Honesty, and Continuity, and, in her essay on the New Frenchwoman, reveals perhaps more about herself than her subjects.
Highly recommended as a fine introduction to the author.

(The numerical rating above is an ineradicable default setting within the format of the site. This reviewer does nor employ numerical ratings).

This book contains about 400 of Wharton's letters, out of about 4,000 extant. It is a careful selection, including "major" letters that are often quoted, and for the first time (other than in a small university publication), a substantial portion of her correspondence with Morton Fullerton, with whom she had an affair while in her mid-40s. That particular correspondence did not surface until the 1980s, and added an entirely new perspective on Wharton's life and work. Unfortunately, nearly all of her correspondence with two of her greatest friends, Henry James and Walter Berry, did not survive, and the absence is felt. I applaud the editors (one of whom wrote a Pulitzer prize winning bio of Wharton) for a selection that is very readable and never trite or repetitive (a big problem when dealing with letters in their entirety). Reading the letters after having read the bio, I found they added to my understanding of Wharton as a person and a writer.

Edith Wharton was born in 1986 to an upper class family in New York City. She could trace her ancestry back three centuries, and was expected to live an aristocratic life. She was educated at home, and married Teddy Wharton in 1885, settling into her role as society marm. Her marriage ended with the discovery of Teddy's affair in 1913, and Edith set herself free to publish many books, of which the most well known is probably The Age Of Innocence. Edith Wharton was a contemporary of Teddy Roosevelt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James. The quality of her writing is just beginning to be appreciated.

Kate Orme is a young woman engaged to Denis Peyton. They are both aristocrats, and as such are expected to remain in rigid roles, with the man shielding the woman from all upsets. When Denis confesses to a despicable act to protect his family's name involving the death of a young, pregnant woman who was secretly married to his brother, Kate is shattered by the exposure of this act. She decides to marry Denis anyway to protect his future children, and sets out to become the perfect mother. She has a son, who she raises by herself after Denis' death, but this son seems to have inherited the faulty character gene of his father. When a situation arises to test the meddle of her son, Kate has her doubts as to her ability as a mother:

"As she sat there in the radius of lamp-light which, for so many evenings, had held Dick and herself in a charmed circle of tenderness, she saw that her love for her boy had come to be merely a kind of extended egotism. Love had narrowed instead of widening her, had rebuilt between herself and life the very walls which, years and years before, she had laid low with bleeding fingers. It was horrible... How she had come to sacrifice everything to the one passion of ambition for her boy..."

Wharton is, obviously, a first rate writer who has gone without accolades for far too long because of her gender. It is fitting that her works be rediscovered by a wider audience. Her insight into gender differences and difficulties is far ahead of her time...a time when women were relegated to narrow roles of motherhood because they were thought to be of inferior intellect. Aside from that, Wharton's writing is so smooth that the reader is instantly ensnared. A great read.

...

The Dover Thrift Edition of "Short Stories" by Edith Wharton is a great collection of some of this writer's work. There are two common themes that run through this collection of 7 stories: (1) the writer and his/her place in society, and (2) women living through the complications of their emotional and/or sexual lives in the context of larger societal pressures. These thematic threads give the collection as a whole a pleasing coherence. The stories included are as follows:

"Expiation": about a woman novelist, this story looks at an intersection point in the worlds of literature and religion. "The Dilettante": about a troublesome romantic triangle. "The Muse's Tragedy": about the problematic emotional legacy of a respected poet. "The Pelican": follows the career of a female lecturer. "Souls Belated": about the relationship between a male novelist and a divorced woman. "Xingu": a comic tale about a snobby ladies' club that is hosting a woman novelist. "The Other Two": the story of a man's relationships with the two ex-husbands of his twice-divorced wife.

Wharton is an excellent writer, and her skills are really on full display in this collection. Peppered throughout the stories are a number of memorable (sometimes even Wildean) lines. Example: "It is always a bad sign when loud people come to a quiet place" (from "Souls"). An ideal choice for literature or women's studies courses (as well as for private reading). Recommended as companion texts: the novel "Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing," by May Sarton, and the Dover Thrift Edition of "Short Stories" by Theodore Dreiser; both of these fine books share themes in common with this Wharton collection.

Wharton is as stunningly effective as in "A House of Mirth", here conveying the frustration of a circle of people interdependent upon one another, destined to follow society's rules no matter what the cost. Each character desperately clutches at a "twilight sleep"; the mode of coping each engages to distance reality. Masquerading as habit or whim, the painted veil of illusion overlays each mode of addictive escape. Nona, the beautiful, well-bred New Yorker struggles with an imperatrix sister-in-law Lita, whose values (and their consequences) threaten the entire social order Nona's family fabric is woven of. The Marchesa dispenses her social value as Pauline erases her son's debts. Lita's tabloid exposure and screen career must be suppressed. The men escape into work while the women flail at vanity of excess. The whistle of tragedy sounds in the distance as Nona falls into love with a married man, her brother Jim hopelessly esconced in a bad marriage with a woman he idolises, while her father works himself into an eagerly embraced oblivion, while Jim's father openly drinks to forget the societal oasis he knew before his divorce. Nona's mother compulsively schedules all their lives to death, while pursuing the escapist mysticism of faith healing and the blind support of the latest guru. As the Jazz Age brings down the curtain on the theatre of old New York and its values, Art and Cinema loom. While the family coalesces at their country estate to save Jim and Lita's marriage, each battle with their chosen talisman against life and its evils. Much more is at stake and much more is lost. This startlingly psychological novel will fascinate any student of life. The sacrifice of a fragment to obtain the societal whole inevitably comes, more starkly portrayed here than anywhere, the novel having served as forceful denouement. In the tolling bells of Whartons' worlds, the death of illusion sounds the deepest peal.

Words Of Ages: Witnessing U.S. History Through Literature is a remarkable 320 page trade paperback book that takes a unique, ground-breaking approach to showcase American history by using letters, journal entries, short stories, and poetry to illustrate the American experience through pen of some of America's greatest authors and historical figures. Included are more than 125 excerpts from such luminaries as Booker T. Washington, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Tom Wolf, Thomas Paine, Chief Tecumseh, Frederick Douglass, Robert Frost, and a host of other to provide an accessible context for understanding the events, places, and people that shaped American history, culture and politics. Words Of Ages is divided chronological into units ranging from "Voices of a Revolution" and "Civil War and Reconstruction", to "Social Critics and Reformers" and "The Vietnam Years". This dynamic, interdisciplinary blending of literature, history, and art provide a most unusual, effective, and academically sound approach that will be read with enthusiasm by anyone with an interest in American history.