“The Lamp of Psyche” “Delia Corbett was too happy; her happiness frightened her.” The story begins with Mrs. Delia Corbett making a series of reflections on her happiness. She’s newly married now in her mid-thirties, having been previously married and widowed (more or less both unhappily). She also reflects that her first husband’s wanderlust (and lust) made her not want to be with him anymore and if she benefited from his death so be it. Her new marriage is just two months old and has […]

“Mrs Manstey’s View” “The view from Mrs. Manstey’s window was not a striking one, but to her at least, it was full of interest and beauty” In this first story, we meet Mrs. Manstey, an elderly woman living in New York in a boarding house. She has a room with a tremendous view, and because she doesn’t really want much else in life except to look out of her window, occasionally read or knit, and contemplate life, things are fairly good. She spends a good […]

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a compelling look at the mores of the upper class in 1800’s New York City and particularly how such mores dictate and limit lives, particularly women’s. The story follows upper class Newland Archer, who is torn between his demure and incurious fiancée and the independent and […]