FRANKLIN LIBRARY LEATHER The Angel at the Grave WHARTON

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FRANKLIN LIBRARY EDITH WHARTON STORIES Illustrated with period photographs Beautiful Topgrain Leather Limited Edition FROM "THE COLLECTED STORIES OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST WRITERS" Like many novelists, Edith Wharton began her career by publishing short stories in magazines. In all, she would publish 86, most of which she compiled in 11 collections that appeared between 1899 and 1937, the year of her death. Two collections, The Greater Inclination and Crucial Instances , as well as a novella, The Touchstone , appeared before she published her first novel at age forty. Wharton had always been fascinated with story telling, and recalled that when she was very small she had “read stories aloud” to herself while holding a copy of Washington Irving’s Alhambra upside down. For her, the process of writing fiction was not only all-consuming, but mysterious, taking place – as she put it, … in some secret region on the sheer edge of consciousness… What happens t is as real and as tangible as my encounters with my friends and neighbors, often more so though on an entirely different plane. It produces in me a great emotional excitement, quite unrelated to the joy or sorrow caused by real happenings, but as intense, and with as great an appearance of reality. Short stories more than longer works, she believed, demanded that he writer focus in on “crucial instances,” significant and different from the daily and the ordinary. To select such instances and to illuminate them without necessarily resolving them required an economy of language and a careful selection of detail. The respect for orderliness which these principles suggest, combined with a passionate sensibility, allowed Edith Wharton to produce many compact, insightful, and often suspenseful stories in which the full significance of the action only emerges clearly in the last lines. If orderliness was beneficial to Edith Wharton’s craft, it sometimes caused her difficulty in her life. As a woman, her first role was expected to be that of a wife, but from the very beginning her marriage to Edward Wharton was a disaster – a mistake that lasted 30 years. Henry James once remarked that in marrying Edward, Edith had done “an almost –o rather an utterly – inconceivable thing.” Her husband shared none of Edith’s literary interests; the marriage was childless and, after a short time, passionless; they had an affectionate fondness for one another, but nothing on which they could build an intimate and emotionally intense relationship. In the staid society from which they came, however, divorce was unacceptable behavior, and a divorced woman a social pariah. Although social mores changed, and the Whartons did eventually divorce, the sensibilities which had shaped Edith Wharton as a young woman were difficult to shake. Throughout her career, Wharton explored the problem of marriage set against the risks divorce posed. The anguish of being entrapped and unable to escape is a recurrent theme in her work, as is the unsatisfactory if not impossible solution of divorce. In her early story, “A Journey,” it is not the husband’s illness alone that has caused the wife to feel that “the conductivity between them was broken.” When she first met him, she had felt he was opening up her life, but “imperceptibly the horizon narrowed. Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread her wings.” It is not just women who feel confined in Wharton’s stories, nor unhappiness the only cause of such confinement. Professor Linyard in “The Descent of Man” longs for liberty from “domestic relations… so complete it was almost impossible to get away from them. It is the happy husbands who are really in bondage, the little rift within the lute is often a passage to freedom.” When Wharton explored the topic of divorce, the picture was even bleaker. Lydia, the divorced woman, and Gannett, her lover in “Souls Belated” have been thrust into a rootless... read more

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