Edith Wharton is wildly out of time. There exists a novel of hers that I have read, Twilight Sleep, that's about wealthy society ladies experimenting with new age religion in New York. It's her Jazz Age novel.
She also has a collection (that I have not read) of her reporting from France during WWI. Think how bizarre that is: Edith Wharton was a war reporter...during World War I.
The bit about never being able to get into Austen/Eliot/realist marriage novels when you were younger particularly resonated with me ā like sure I wish I had been a real literary head as a kid but no, it was science fiction and fantasy all day every day lol and I wouldn't have had it any other way at the time.
and though I have a pang of regret at being so late to the domestic canon I am now devouring (currently halfway through Howards End!), there's also a certain joy to coming at it with the kind of life experience that lets you understand the characters and allow their choices (or lack thereof) to shed light on the ones which face you... thank you for this!
Same here. Funnily enough I don't read that much SFF any more but the two I read in the last few years that really blew me away -- Little, Big and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell -- I now realize are both genre novels in the guise of domestic realist ones.
Totally agree and yeah, Howards End is so good. This is a weird way to praise something but I always think of it as the ultimate middlebrow novel, like the ideal form of Sally Rooney or something. It's not some tortured work of mad genius but is a well crafted novel with very charming characters and beautiful bits of description and is permeated throughout by an essential warmth and kindness and decency. It's also a little bit silly and has one particular bit of crushing symbolism at the end that is A Bit Much in a funny way. It's just very lovable. I love it!
I adore JSMN but have never heard of Little, Bigāadding to list as well!
As a connoisseur of the immediate pre-war period and all of the associated complicated social mores in flux (in Britain in particular), Howards End is total catnip to me... Sometimes the characters are completely alien and other times they are so totally universal and human and relatable.... as one myself I am loving how the figure of the late-20s independently minded spinster is being explored š
I endorse Little, Big very forcefully; some of the most gorgeous prose ever, one of my S-tier favorites. And yeah same here, it's fascinating to watch that world slip away. I always think it might be a good idea (inasmuch as anyone still reads this stuff in school) to introduce people to Forster/early and middle James/Wharton before Austen/Eliot/Dickens etc-- the prose is a bit more straightforward and the victorian social mores are questioned rather than being taken for granted which can be disorienting to read if you're not familiar with them.
"Itās about getting older." So much of getting older is realizing just how much of life IS about getting older ā how central the passage of time and the inevitability of age and loss are to being alive. Probably this was glaringly obvious to every other society in history, but we've successfully insulated ourselves (or our young people, anyway, or most of them) from the reality of death to a remarkable degree. Which maybe has something to do with our culture's obsession with youth and flash and its tendency to get bored with adult bourgeois realism. But the older I get, the more interested I am in the strange sad ways that people grapple with those central questions you're talking about here, and the more relevance I see in my own life. (Reading Jane Austen for the first time currently and loving it.)
The meeting of Archer and Ellen at the Metropolitan Museum is exquisite.... in the antiquities wing, placing Archer among his fellow relics. All the more powerful after the epilogue and its "reveal" of the book's temporal framing, that we've been gazing backward all along at a vanished era. Almost unbearably painful and tender. Thanks for reminding us of how beautiful this book is!
That's a great scene. All the symbolism in the book (May tearing her wedding dress, the literal archery competition happening while Archer goes to look for Ellen on the beach, etc etc) is always present but never overreaches, as you only get with the greats.
Another home run! I so get what you mean, Iāve been reading the ambassadors for a while now and frankly, I might still be too young for it, but it wouldāve been entirely incomprehensible to me for instance, when I was 19. Very much, felt about not appreciating the marriage plot bourgeois novel etc.
What a wonderful piece, beautifully observed. I love how you articulated this: āItās hard to decide whether Wharton is ultimately a kind novelist or a cruel novelist.ā I love that about her! She teases and tortures her characters and yet paints them with such empathy. I love her description of Mrs. Mingott whose extraordinary size is played in part for laughs but also to give her this literal gravity, where her visitors are forced to make a pilgrimage uptown to see her.
Thank you, yeah in this very realist novel she puts in a teaspoon of Dickensian comic exaggeration that's pretty fun. I like the scene w/ Mingott and all her weird hippie friends, like the one who runs some sort of socialist commune.
This was exactly what I was looking for. I think I read Middlemarch in my late twenties, early thirties and thought, yes, I wouldnāt have gotten it at all if Iād read it earlier. I read Wharton a couple of years ago and wished Iād read her even earlier, Iām sure Iāll return to these books again in a decade or so.
I just finished The Corrections and was stumped about why people hated Franzen so much, and then I read his review of Wharton and thought, wow, I actually kind of agree with him about the role of tragic beauty in these books, but I would never write an essay talking about a how a female author is ugly! Anyway, fun read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/13/a-rooting-interest
Yeah I read this in my research for this essay (which was originally much more critically engaged), I wouldnāt either, I guess, but then again Wharton would probably respect that kind of pitiless social observation.
I think the line from Wharton to Franzen is strong. His social parodying of gentrifying liberals in Freedom feels like slightly turned-up Wharton. They both excel at writing flawed characters with humor and humanity.
The critic and professor Merve Emre is a defender of that Franzen/Wharton New Yorker piece. I know that because there is an excellent Franzen-focused podcast called Mr. Difficult. They dive into this āwhy is Franzen loved and hatedā question and have one episode for each of his books.
Thanks for that podcast rec! I'll probably check it out---I've only read The Corrections and quite strangely his memoir about growing up in Webster Groves (The Discomfort Zone) because I lived in St. Louis for a while. There is something extremely patrician about St. Louis, and that's definitely reflected in those two books. There's a very specific social milieu there that could kind of translate to the one that Wharton lived in, whereas many other midsized American cities lack this kind of specific power elite. You can almost imagine the tableaux vivants scene in The House of Mirth actually happening in St. Louis, with its Veiled Prophet Ball and its Belles:
"Iāve lived long enough to see friends with whom I once promised to conquer the world fall, like Newland Archer, into dull routine and proceed along predetermined tracks, the light imperceptibly fading from their eyes a bit more every day; long enough to have relationships fall apart for ultimately silly and stubborn reasons, or because I failed to be as courageous or as honest as I might have been. And I realize now that thatās what all these novels are actually about." loved this. thanks for writing.
I read House of Mirth recently. Iām in my late twenties and my wedding is a few weeks away. Her character Lily Bart is 29 and has a desperation to marry that I found sickening. I was jokingly describing it as a psychological horror novel for straight women older than 27. The group I was reading it with is full of people in their sixties, all in decades long partnerships, and I felt that it wasnāt affecting them in the same way.
Thanks! I love The Age of Innocence, and this beautifully captures it. I do think it's valuable reading "Autre Temps ...", perhaps my favorite of her short stories, which deals with a very similar theme. (Also "The Long Run", a lesser but still interesting story.) And The House of Mirth, set much later (around 1900), which has a very different plot of course but is still about choices and about trying to do something society won't let you do and realizing too late that you are stuck (much more tragically in Lily Bart's case, to be sure.)
I didn't come to Wharton (except for Ethan Frome) until I was 50 or so, and that was probably good. That said, I loved Austen as a teen -- but I read her differently now.
I'm a dutiful follower of John Pistelli's lectures, so I'll assuredly be reading The House of Mirth in a few weeks (and The Portrait of a Lady as well).
Came straight here after finishing Age of Innocence. Love it. The way Archer just sat there 26 years later staring at Olenskaās awnings before walking back to his hotel was devastating.
I too never had interest in novels like this when I was younger, but wish I would have. Itās almost an antidote to the kind of entertainment that leads you to expect life becoming one way, and inevitably becoming disappointing when you age, as it becomes another. Lives of quiet comfortable regret is the best most can hope for.
re The revolution of literature in the 1920's, "The World Broke in Two" by Bill Goldstein is a fascinating study of how Woolf, Lawrence, Foster, and Elliot made a giant leap in literature in 1922 that separated past and future.
Excellent article. I finished this book last night and was pleasantly surprised at how invested I found myself in it. I think you've nailed it, straight to the heart, of why I think it's so interesting. As someone who's turned 50 this year I too have looked back and seen paths not taken, doors once opened that have since closed, and wondered at forks in the road at what perhaps could have been.
I recently acquired Age of Innocence from a picked-over library sale with no plans to read itāI shared all of your preconceptions about the book until a moment ago when you dispelled them for me. *grumbling* I guess Iāll have to add it to my Begler TBR
True. I think this is why I admire Steinbeck so much ā and so much more than Hemingway. His doctorās like, āJohn. Youāre going to die of heart disease and that right soon.ā
John says, āOkay, Iāll load up a camper and road trip across the entire United States again.ā
āJohn, I think you misheard me.ā
āNah, heard you fine. My wife married a man, not a boy or a corpse. Be a shame to become a boy all of a sudden.ā
Itās not macho, itās just agency and risk. He took it. As a result, we got Travels with Charlie.
This to me is the real trick of Lord of the Rings: Frodo is in his fifties, Bilbo is 111.
Iām a huge Wharton fan, and rereading her work has also shown me how *witty* she is. Thanks for sharing your love of her!!
Edith Wharton is wildly out of time. There exists a novel of hers that I have read, Twilight Sleep, that's about wealthy society ladies experimenting with new age religion in New York. It's her Jazz Age novel.
She also has a collection (that I have not read) of her reporting from France during WWI. Think how bizarre that is: Edith Wharton was a war reporter...during World War I.
Moving Wharton up my list!!!!
The bit about never being able to get into Austen/Eliot/realist marriage novels when you were younger particularly resonated with me ā like sure I wish I had been a real literary head as a kid but no, it was science fiction and fantasy all day every day lol and I wouldn't have had it any other way at the time.
and though I have a pang of regret at being so late to the domestic canon I am now devouring (currently halfway through Howards End!), there's also a certain joy to coming at it with the kind of life experience that lets you understand the characters and allow their choices (or lack thereof) to shed light on the ones which face you... thank you for this!
Same here. Funnily enough I don't read that much SFF any more but the two I read in the last few years that really blew me away -- Little, Big and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell -- I now realize are both genre novels in the guise of domestic realist ones.
Totally agree and yeah, Howards End is so good. This is a weird way to praise something but I always think of it as the ultimate middlebrow novel, like the ideal form of Sally Rooney or something. It's not some tortured work of mad genius but is a well crafted novel with very charming characters and beautiful bits of description and is permeated throughout by an essential warmth and kindness and decency. It's also a little bit silly and has one particular bit of crushing symbolism at the end that is A Bit Much in a funny way. It's just very lovable. I love it!
I adore JSMN but have never heard of Little, Bigāadding to list as well!
As a connoisseur of the immediate pre-war period and all of the associated complicated social mores in flux (in Britain in particular), Howards End is total catnip to me... Sometimes the characters are completely alien and other times they are so totally universal and human and relatable.... as one myself I am loving how the figure of the late-20s independently minded spinster is being explored š
I endorse Little, Big very forcefully; some of the most gorgeous prose ever, one of my S-tier favorites. And yeah same here, it's fascinating to watch that world slip away. I always think it might be a good idea (inasmuch as anyone still reads this stuff in school) to introduce people to Forster/early and middle James/Wharton before Austen/Eliot/Dickens etc-- the prose is a bit more straightforward and the victorian social mores are questioned rather than being taken for granted which can be disorienting to read if you're not familiar with them.
"Itās about getting older." So much of getting older is realizing just how much of life IS about getting older ā how central the passage of time and the inevitability of age and loss are to being alive. Probably this was glaringly obvious to every other society in history, but we've successfully insulated ourselves (or our young people, anyway, or most of them) from the reality of death to a remarkable degree. Which maybe has something to do with our culture's obsession with youth and flash and its tendency to get bored with adult bourgeois realism. But the older I get, the more interested I am in the strange sad ways that people grapple with those central questions you're talking about here, and the more relevance I see in my own life. (Reading Jane Austen for the first time currently and loving it.)
The meeting of Archer and Ellen at the Metropolitan Museum is exquisite.... in the antiquities wing, placing Archer among his fellow relics. All the more powerful after the epilogue and its "reveal" of the book's temporal framing, that we've been gazing backward all along at a vanished era. Almost unbearably painful and tender. Thanks for reminding us of how beautiful this book is!
That's a great scene. All the symbolism in the book (May tearing her wedding dress, the literal archery competition happening while Archer goes to look for Ellen on the beach, etc etc) is always present but never overreaches, as you only get with the greats.
Another home run! I so get what you mean, Iāve been reading the ambassadors for a while now and frankly, I might still be too young for it, but it wouldāve been entirely incomprehensible to me for instance, when I was 19. Very much, felt about not appreciating the marriage plot bourgeois novel etc.
Thanks GA! Yeah don't you hate it when people are like "you'll understand it when you're older" and then you actually do?
What a wonderful piece, beautifully observed. I love how you articulated this: āItās hard to decide whether Wharton is ultimately a kind novelist or a cruel novelist.ā I love that about her! She teases and tortures her characters and yet paints them with such empathy. I love her description of Mrs. Mingott whose extraordinary size is played in part for laughs but also to give her this literal gravity, where her visitors are forced to make a pilgrimage uptown to see her.
Thank you, yeah in this very realist novel she puts in a teaspoon of Dickensian comic exaggeration that's pretty fun. I like the scene w/ Mingott and all her weird hippie friends, like the one who runs some sort of socialist commune.
This was exactly what I was looking for. I think I read Middlemarch in my late twenties, early thirties and thought, yes, I wouldnāt have gotten it at all if Iād read it earlier. I read Wharton a couple of years ago and wished Iād read her even earlier, Iām sure Iāll return to these books again in a decade or so.
I just finished The Corrections and was stumped about why people hated Franzen so much, and then I read his review of Wharton and thought, wow, I actually kind of agree with him about the role of tragic beauty in these books, but I would never write an essay talking about a how a female author is ugly! Anyway, fun read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/13/a-rooting-interest
Yeah I read this in my research for this essay (which was originally much more critically engaged), I wouldnāt either, I guess, but then again Wharton would probably respect that kind of pitiless social observation.
I think the line from Wharton to Franzen is strong. His social parodying of gentrifying liberals in Freedom feels like slightly turned-up Wharton. They both excel at writing flawed characters with humor and humanity.
The critic and professor Merve Emre is a defender of that Franzen/Wharton New Yorker piece. I know that because there is an excellent Franzen-focused podcast called Mr. Difficult. They dive into this āwhy is Franzen loved and hatedā question and have one episode for each of his books.
https://mrdifficult.com
Thanks for that podcast rec! I'll probably check it out---I've only read The Corrections and quite strangely his memoir about growing up in Webster Groves (The Discomfort Zone) because I lived in St. Louis for a while. There is something extremely patrician about St. Louis, and that's definitely reflected in those two books. There's a very specific social milieu there that could kind of translate to the one that Wharton lived in, whereas many other midsized American cities lack this kind of specific power elite. You can almost imagine the tableaux vivants scene in The House of Mirth actually happening in St. Louis, with its Veiled Prophet Ball and its Belles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Veiled_Prophet_Belles_and_Queens
"Iāve lived long enough to see friends with whom I once promised to conquer the world fall, like Newland Archer, into dull routine and proceed along predetermined tracks, the light imperceptibly fading from their eyes a bit more every day; long enough to have relationships fall apart for ultimately silly and stubborn reasons, or because I failed to be as courageous or as honest as I might have been. And I realize now that thatās what all these novels are actually about." loved this. thanks for writing.
I read House of Mirth recently. Iām in my late twenties and my wedding is a few weeks away. Her character Lily Bart is 29 and has a desperation to marry that I found sickening. I was jokingly describing it as a psychological horror novel for straight women older than 27. The group I was reading it with is full of people in their sixties, all in decades long partnerships, and I felt that it wasnāt affecting them in the same way.
Thanks! I love The Age of Innocence, and this beautifully captures it. I do think it's valuable reading "Autre Temps ...", perhaps my favorite of her short stories, which deals with a very similar theme. (Also "The Long Run", a lesser but still interesting story.) And The House of Mirth, set much later (around 1900), which has a very different plot of course but is still about choices and about trying to do something society won't let you do and realizing too late that you are stuck (much more tragically in Lily Bart's case, to be sure.)
I didn't come to Wharton (except for Ethan Frome) until I was 50 or so, and that was probably good. That said, I loved Austen as a teen -- but I read her differently now.
I'm a dutiful follower of John Pistelli's lectures, so I'll assuredly be reading The House of Mirth in a few weeks (and The Portrait of a Lady as well).
Came straight here after finishing Age of Innocence. Love it. The way Archer just sat there 26 years later staring at Olenskaās awnings before walking back to his hotel was devastating.
I too never had interest in novels like this when I was younger, but wish I would have. Itās almost an antidote to the kind of entertainment that leads you to expect life becoming one way, and inevitably becoming disappointing when you age, as it becomes another. Lives of quiet comfortable regret is the best most can hope for.
re The revolution of literature in the 1920's, "The World Broke in Two" by Bill Goldstein is a fascinating study of how Woolf, Lawrence, Foster, and Elliot made a giant leap in literature in 1922 that separated past and future.
And btw, Wharton's Custom of the Country is an amazing book, and Undine Sprague is a totally original (for its time) creation.
Excellent article. I finished this book last night and was pleasantly surprised at how invested I found myself in it. I think you've nailed it, straight to the heart, of why I think it's so interesting. As someone who's turned 50 this year I too have looked back and seen paths not taken, doors once opened that have since closed, and wondered at forks in the road at what perhaps could have been.
I recently acquired Age of Innocence from a picked-over library sale with no plans to read itāI shared all of your preconceptions about the book until a moment ago when you dispelled them for me. *grumbling* I guess Iāll have to add it to my Begler TBR
True. I think this is why I admire Steinbeck so much ā and so much more than Hemingway. His doctorās like, āJohn. Youāre going to die of heart disease and that right soon.ā
John says, āOkay, Iāll load up a camper and road trip across the entire United States again.ā
āJohn, I think you misheard me.ā
āNah, heard you fine. My wife married a man, not a boy or a corpse. Be a shame to become a boy all of a sudden.ā
Itās not macho, itās just agency and risk. He took it. As a result, we got Travels with Charlie.
This to me is the real trick of Lord of the Rings: Frodo is in his fifties, Bilbo is 111.