The Mount's Blog

January 26, 2012 – 12:09 pm

We’re just now coming up for air after the heart-pounding whirlwind of activity surrounding Edith’s milestone birthday (but we have to take a deep breath and dive right back in; we’ve got a big party to prepare for). The Wharton tributes and shout-outs were amazing! From blog posts to tweets to photos to collages to Facebook status updates, Edith was honored around the world. Hundreds of writers and readers and scholars and designers shared their thoughts about why she continues to deserve attention and praise in the 21st century. A sampling of posts is below; we are hoping to add others as soon as we’re able.

So to everyone who sand Edith’s praises (or plans to): a big, earnest thank you from your fellow Wharton admirers at The Mount. You’ve made this a celebration to remember!

Remember: if you’re in NYC today, join us tonight at the Center for Fiction for a marathon reading of The House of Mirth. It’s going to be terrific.

January 15, 2012 – 12:08 am

The celebrated English novelist Anita Brookner lauded Edith Wharton with a heartfelt tribute in Saturday’s Telegraph. With grace and precision, Ms. Brookner crystallizes Wharton’s lasting contributions to literature, noting with measured awe her personal triumphs and impressive depth of insight:

“[Wharton] managed the difficult feat of being both worldly and morally scrupulous. Born to great wealth, owner of beautiful houses, she was in essence that awkward creature, a born writer…Her worldliness was innate. Yet she understood those whose fortunes were diametrically opposed to her own, like Ethan Frome and Lily Bart, the latter reduced to entertaining her patronesses’ husbands and performing the odd trivial task in exchange for the promise of further invitation.”

We strongly encourage you to read it, if you haven’t yet. Comments (here, and on the Telegraph site) are welcome!

January 8, 2012 – 7:27 pm

This post was generously contributed on behalf of The Edith Wharton Society by Stephanie Miller (Devon, UK):

The resounding sentiment of the “Wharton at 150” panel at the 127^th Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Seattle, Washington, on Friday is that Wharton studies in 2012 is as vital, dynamic, and full of intellectual promise as ever! I felt privileged to be part of the exciting panel, which was chaired by Gary Totten (North Dakota State University) of The Edith Wharton Society. Irene Goldman-Price (Great Barrington, MA), Rita Bode (Trent Univ.), and I presented on a wide range of fascinatingly interconnected topics. (For full details, please click here for links to the individual abstracts.)

Goldman-Price’s reflections on Wharton’s letters to her governess, Anna Bahlmann, covered topics from travel writing to translation. (The letters are to be published in an upcoming volume from Yale Books, available for pre-order here.) Particularly exciting are the letters from a young Wharton, which fill a huge gap in existing correspondence. Goldman-Price’s paper also shed light on the enormous potential for further archival research on Wharton. (I suspect several members of the audience will be pursuing her juicy leads!)

Bode’s lively presentation considered a variety of possible resonances between Wharton’s work and that of Joseph Conrad, focusing particularly on the novel Summer. Bode launched her analysis, compellingly, with an insightful discussion of Conrad’s ambiguous praise of Wharton’s representation of the “untutored soul” (Charity), and all its varied implications.

My own paper drew on theories of narrative closure and performativity to consider the unfinished play Kate Spain in relation to its completed counterpart, the short story “Confession,” contextualizing both texts in relation to the archive of Lizzie Borden fictional versions, more broadly.

The question-and-answer portion of the session was highly stimulating. Discussion addressed Wharton’s open endings, the implications of the Wharton/Conrad connection for conceptions of Wharton as modernist, Wharton’s choices of genre, copyright issues surrounding archival research on Wharton, and the strikingly harsh characterization of Cassie in “Confession” and Kate Spain.

The three papers shared a noteworthy attention to materiality, to historicity, to social and cultural contexts, and to subtle nuances of Wharton’s work. Their varied perspectives show that contemporary Wharton studies exists at a vibrant intersection of diverse intellectual concerns, with an exciting future of continuing scholarship