Table Of ContentEDITH WHARTON: TRAVELLER IN THE
LAND OF LETTERS
Edith Wharton
Traveller in the Land of Letters
Janet Beer Goodwyn
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-333-62327-5 ISBN 978-1-349-24006-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24006-7
EDITH WHARTON
Copyright© 1990 by Janet Patricia Beer Goodwyn
Ali rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critica! articles or reviews.
For information, address:
St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
Reprint of the original edition 1995
ISBN 978-0-312-03200-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-312-12146-4 (pbk.)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beer Goodwyn, Janet, 1956-
Edith Wharton : traveller in the land of letters 1 Janet Beer
Goodwyn. -New York : St. Martin's Press, 1990.
xii, 184 p. ; 23 cm.
Further Reading: p. 166-168.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-03200-5 (cloth)- ISBN 978-0-312-12146-4 (pbk.)
1. Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937-Criticism and interpretation. 1. Title.
PS3545.H16Z655 1990 813'.52-dc19 89-6050
AACR 2 MARC
For my parents, with love
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Preface to the 1995 Reprint
X
Introduction 1
1 The Valley of Decision 8
2 The Customs of the Country: France 25
3 Fighting France 44
4 Inside the House of Mirth 56
5 The Writing of American Fiction 81
6 'Literature' or the Various Forms of Autobiography 103
7 The Age of Innocence 131
Conclusion 154
Notes and References 155
Further Reading 166
Index 169
vii
Acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permis
sion to quote from the work of Edith Wharton:
The Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University;
Watkins/Loomis Agency Inc., New York, for excerpts from A
Backward Glance (New York: 1934; reprinted by Constable & Co.,
1972).
I would also like to thank everyone who has helped me with my
work on Edith Wharton, both in England and the United States,
and particularly the staff of the Yale Beinecke Library, 1980-1981.
My special thanks are due to John Stokes, who saw my work
through its academic process; to my husband, Andrew Goodwyn,
who has shared his home with Edith Wharton for a decade and can
still express enthusiasm for her; to Marion Maidment, for her love
and support; and, finally, to my son, Thomas Goodwyn, for being
a sound sleeper.
Janet Beer Goodwyn
ix
Preface to the 1995 Reprint
Edith Wharton's literary reputation has soared in the last two
decades. The publication of R. W. B. Lewis's biography in 1975
marked a revitalisation of critical interest in Wharton's writing
which has brought her back to her proper place in the forefront
of any consideration of early twentieth-century American litera
ture. As I write the BBC is filming a lavish British-American co
production of Wharton's last, unfinished novel, The Buccaneers,
films of The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome are in the cinemas
and the books are on the bestseller lists, just as they were in her
lifetime. These indications of a general as well as a specialist
academic interest in her work is testimony to the breadth and
accessibility of her writing as well as to the enduring relevance of
her themes and concerns.
Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters looks at Wharton's
novels, autobiographies and travel writing in terms of her inspir
ational use of particular landscapes and different cultures. The
book is concerned with all Wharton's novels, giving serious con
sideration to texts such as Twilight Sleep and The Glimpses of the
Moon, still underrated in 1994, as well as to the much discussed
The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. I began my
research for this study of Wharton in 1980 and although I find
that today I have more and different things to say about Whar
ton's work, and, in particular, about the short stories which are
excluded from the discussion here, I feel most satisfied with the
sections of the book which treat the texts unfamiliar to the gen
eral reader and with my work on her various autobiographical
writings. It is here that I hoped, and still hope, to extend the
range, and indeed the canon, of the Wharton texts which are
given attention by both an academic and a general audience.
I first conceived of this book as one which would examine
Wharton's writing through the medium of her autobiographies,
looking at how her own accounts of her life related to and in
formed her fictions. As I plunged deeper into her non-fiction
what I found was that Wharton's art was interdependent, the
travel as well as the autobiographical writing sustaining an intimate
X
Preface to the 1995 Reprint xi
relationship with her creative work and providing the sort of
multi-cultural context which could support and indeed illuminate
a reading of her novels which was topographically based. My
enabling principle was, and continues to be, Wharton's own
description of a self-willed and self-fulfilling residence in the
'Land of Letters', the place where her work and her life could
finally conjoin. Her metaphoric construction of a literary terrain
gave me a number of points of access to the range and depth of
her writing. I am aware that it is but one among many modes of
access to the infinite variety that is Edith Wharton's work. Many
outstanding books on Wharton have been published in the last
decade and I have taken the opportunity of this reprint to up
date the Further Reading section of this book to reflect the exhilar
ating critical revolution in the field of Wharton studies that has
taken place.
Janet Beer Goodwyn
1995
Introduction
Edith Wharton's first novel, The Valley of Decision, was published in
1902, a month after her fortieth birthday. For the child who used to
cover the brown wrapping paper from her mother's Paris dresses
with closely written stories and pace about her bedroom, upside
down text in hand, declaiming her own fictions to the walls, this
belated publication marked a definitive change of life. Wharton
had been in print before 1902: a small volume of poetry, two
collections of short stories, a treatise on interior design co-written
with the architect, Ogden Codman, and a novella. All these
preceded The Valley of Decision, but it was the novel which truly
marked her entry into the world of the professional writer.
This 'romantic chronicle'1 as Wharton called her first novel, was
an experiment which she never repeated; never again did she
venture so far into the past nor so deep into another country
without an American cast of characters. However, the processes of
composition of the book, the background reading and organisation
of historical material, proved to be an invaluable exercise for the
aspiring novelist, especially when looked at in conjunction with
the writing of her two Italian travel books, Italian Villas and Their
Gardens, published in 1904, and Italian Backgrounds, 1905. Her
successful apprenticeship in the short story combined with her
skills as observer and recorder in the guidebooks provided an
inspirational beginning for an artist whose work would always be
distinguished by its innovative use of specific landscapes and its
topographical coherence.
Wharton thought of her fiction as possessing a particular geogra
phy and from the time of publication of The Valley of Decision
onwards she was to regard the plying of the written word as much
more than her profession; in fact, her art became her place of
residence; as she says in her published autobiography, A Backward
Glance:
I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out
naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has
finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth
to be my country and I gloried in my new citizenship?
1
