“Where is our Byron–our Scott–our Shakespeare? And in painting it is the same. Where are our Old Masters? We are not without contemporary talent; but for works of genius we must still look to the past; we must, in most cases, content ourselves with copies…” This sort of lays the groundwork for the anxiety held within this novella. Written in the 1920s, there’s still a kind of irony that Wharton also has missed some of the greats of American literature. While she was a huge […]
The Awakening, but with less water
As a Louisiana native, English major, and self-proclaimed avid reader, I have read and studied “The Awakening” many times over. For the unfamiliar, it is about a woman who struggles against the bonds of her marriage, and the confines of society in Louisiana at the turn of the century. Here is the first line of the Goodreads synopsis. When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. I was not a fan of The Awakening initially. As a teenager […]
The wonder of free Kindle books
Recently I found myself finishing my last book. With no more library books waiting for me, I browsed through the free Kindle books I’d found on Amazon months ago. Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) stuck out. I’ve always been incredibly impressed by Edith Wharton’s writing, and I almost immediately started reading. I’m kind of ashamed by how long I let this classic languish on my Kindle while I’ve been distracted by the new and the shiny. To be honest, when I began […]
In the Bleak Mid-Winter
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 […]