I’ve now read all of two Edith Wharton novels and she is fast becoming one of my favorite writers. With beautiful evocative prose, Wharton creates the socially circumscribed world of early 20th-century East Coast America, a bleak place where romantic tragedies occur. In The House of Mirth, the main character Lily Bart was a beautiful young woman whose family status gave her access to upper class New York society but whose sex and poverty severely limited her ability to function successfully there. In Ethan Frome, […]
Mommy Wars, circa 1899
Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This classic of American Literature is the tragic story of Edna Pontellier as she awakens to the reality of her own desires and the limits her world places upon them. Like Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, this novel shows the unfairness of restrictions that men and society at large placed on women, and women’s growing […]
Love is a broken pickle dish.
I’ve read two Edith Wharton novels, so I’d consider myself a fan. I thought The House of Mirth, while extremely depressing, was very compelling and engaging. The Age of Innocence has been my favorite so far, because it is an elegant novel. Also, I read it for a class The Chancellor and I were in when we first started seeing each other, so…yeah. There *might* be a touch of nostalgia surrounding it. I’d never read Ethan Frome, but I remember a student complaining about having […]