Abstract Toward the end of her life, Edith Wharton described herself as “an incorrigible life-lover & life-wonderer.” This article contends that wonder is a crucial mechanism in how Wharton responds to aesthetic artifacts. Through a detailed analysis of her response to Amiens Cathedral in A Motor-Flight through France, this article illustrates how Wharton adopts and advocates what Philip Fisher calls an “aesthetics of wonder”—an interpretive stance wherein the intellect’s drive to know a work of visual art is inaugurated and sustained by Cartesian wonder. Such a stance allows analysis to unfold, nourished by specialist knowledge, without banishing emotion and sensation. Taking her response to Amiens as paradigmatic, I also address how similar dynamics mark her responses to Bourges, Beauvais, and Rheims in Motor-Flight, while noting important parallels between Wharton’s approach to aesthetics and the ideas of John Addington Symonds.

With this issue, the editorial team is most happy to welcome Lina Geriguis as the journal’s book review editor. Lina joined the editorial team last summer and we all feel extremely fortunate to have her in this role.We are also pleased to announce two new additions to the journal’s editorial board and thank them for their willingness to contribute their time to advancing Wharton scholarship. They are Margaret Jay Jessee and Paul J. Ohler. The list of editorial board members can be found on the inside cover.We are now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century. What was Wharton doing at the quarter-century mark of the twentieth? The Mother’s Recompense appeared in volume form in April, after its serial publication the previous year, and in October, the series of essays that had been appearing in Scribner’s throughout the year was published as The Writing of Fiction. Her letter writing, with its details both great and small through which she fostered her many friendships and relationships, continued strong. Always ready to share her reading responses, on June 9, she wrote enthusiastically to lifelong friend Daisy (Margaret Mary Chanler): “I’m plunged at this moment in a masterpiece 20 years old, which I had never read: The Life of Pasteur. What a man—& what a book! He did feel life to be a vale of soul-making! I wonder who does in the day we live in?” Wharton’s query transcends her own “day” to resonate with all days, including our own.Not only does Wharton consistently make the astute forward-looking comment but she also continually asks the significant question. Following her lead, this issue’s articles probe two of Wharton’s most popular and most studied novels: The Age of Innocence and Summer.Joe Larios approaches Wharton through the courtly love structure outlined in Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In “Newland Archer and the Courtly Love Structure in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence,” Larios traces how Newland’s passionate investment in Ellen as unattainable stabilizes his relationship with May but at the same time disallows the full pleasures that his marriage might offer and prevents a meaningful relationship with Ellen.Anthony Dathy’s “Beyond Ideals: Edith Wharton’s Critique of Transcendentalism in Summer” suggests that the novel provides a “metatextual commentary” reflecting Wharton’s ambivalence toward transcendentalist tenets. Employing a range of stylistic and interdisciplinary approaches, Dathy argues that the novel’s “traces of transcendentalist thought” serve to foreground issues like gender and class, which usually occupy the margins in transcendentalism, as Wharton formulates “a new cultural synthesis relevant to her time.”In the issue’s next section, we turn to a roundtable on ghost stories by Wharton and two other American women writers: Shannon Brennan took the lead for “Home and Unheimlich: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Brennan and contributors Leah B. Glasser, Paul J. Ohler, and Jana Tigchelaar mingle freely and creatively with the specters of these writers as they discuss the continuing (I can’t resist adding haunting) presence of these works in critical discourse.The EWS archivist, Carole Shaffer-Koros, has provided the history of the Society in past issues. In “The Edith Wharton Review: Our Fortieth Anniversary in 2024,” she turns to the history of the journal as it has evolved since its inception in 1984. These histories provide invaluable records of the development of Wharton studies.The “Notes on . . .” section has Ryan Edward Pine’s discussion of The Custom of the Country, in which he notes the novel’s satiric aspects and invokes the myth of Narcissus to suggest the novel’s alignments with trends and patterns in contemporary social media. Pine shows the novel to be a productively teachable text in today’s college classrooms.Adele Kudish adds to the journal’s continuing attention to theatrical and other transmedial adaptations of Wharton in her review of the chamber opera In Venice, performed in Manhattan in the fall of 2024. Composer Paul Scherer and librettist Germaine Shames turn to two Wharton works for their creation: The Touchstone and “The Muse’s Tragedy.”In the book review section, all three books reviewed have significant sections on Wharton’s works. One involves literary naturalism and two focus on the progressive era. Eric W. Hughes reviews the volume of essays coedited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson entitled The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism; Stephanie Palmer reviews Hannah Huber’s Sleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature; and Laura R. Fisher reviews Arielle Zibrak’s Writing against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era.The editorial team extends its sincere thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for this issue and to the production team at Pennsylvania State University Press.

Abstract This article examines the literary geography of Edith Wharton’s Jazz Age New York in Twilight Sleep. It considers the impact of the urban narrative upon the characters, and how this work can be understood as a spatial event. Sheila Hones describes literary geography as the interdisciplinary nexus between literary studies and geography. Building upon this definition, the author extends the interdisciplinarity of narrative spatiality toward the medical humanities. Edith Wharton’s New York is embodied, possessing its own animus like an automaton, being simultaneously alive and dead, dazzling yet breathless, killing but beautiful. There is a sickness to the city which impacts most of the major characters, either physically or mentally. Using the epigraph as a framework, this article offers an innovative consideration of the relationship between fictional place and mental state, highlighting Edith Wharton’s use of space and place in Twilight Sleep to warn of the danger New York represented to female mental health.

Abstract Although past critics of Wharton’s work have focused on the social world she depicts, Wharton also presents the natural world in her work, from poems she wrote as a teenager through her late writings. Using Thomas Lyon’s “Taxonomy of Nature Writing” (1989), this article looks at a range of Wharton’s work to argue that she is indeed a “nature writer.” Wharton’s work in Italian Villas and Their Gardens and A Motor-Flight Through France meditate on the relationship between landscape and human habitation, and her lifelong experiences of gardening in various climates deepened her ecological understanding of climatological differences. Wharton’s first published story “Mrs. Manstey’s View” argues for the importance of nature even in an urban setting, while also creating a character who is a phenologist (someone who studies seasonal cycles); much later in her career, her paired novels Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive not only demonstrate Wharton’s own skill as a nature writer, but also convey the importance of nature, both cosmic and local, as inspiration to the writer. Finally, the article suggests that Wharton’s attentiveness to nature may have made her a better writer; moreover, it asks readers to consider Wharton’s depictions of nature as they consider today’s ecological crisis.

Abstract Teaching Edith Wharton’s fiction inevitably leads to discussion of the institution of marriage itself. A perennial student favorite, her short story “Roman Fever” (1934) provokes thought on a variety of American attitudes, in particular the role of women in traditional American marriages—how it has both changed and remained somewhat the same over time. The later works shed light on the consistency of Wharton’s insistence on the complexity of women and her frustration with the nation’s gendered assumptions. With her novels as well as her short fiction, Wharton instantiates her critique of the custom of the country. Nearly a century after its publication, readers consistently react to the moment one student of mine dubbed the “mic drop” at the end of “Roman Fever.” The brevity of the story gives room for students to read primary and secondary sources, and each class finds new complexities in a seemingly simple work of short fiction.

Abstract This essay explores the inscription of codes and intersemiotics in Wharton's The Age of Innocence and its 1993 adaptation by Martin Scorsese, and analyzes the effects derived from them. It begins by showing how the sense of ironical distance that prevails in the first chapters of the novel is redefined in the film, especially in the brilliant title sequence and opening scene that set a different tone, more likely to trigger identification with the characters and produce emotion, instead of underscoring convention. Apart from the opera motif, other intersemiotic connections that function differently in the book and its adaptation deserve to be examined. Thus the essay studies how pictorial quotations abound in the film, more than in Wharton's novel, especially works by James Tissot that convey a sense of ambiguity, while other paintings are related to the transcoding of violence and mystery. It then discusses the subversive emphasis on frames and framing and the reference to tableau vivant, before dwelling on facets of textual and filmic reflexivity.

Vike Plock's Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers is a compelling study of the ways that fashion culturally conditioned Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, and Virginia Woolf. Plock is concerned in particular with how these writers explored, and were shaped by, what Georg Simmel has described as fashion's “antagonistic principles” of “differentiation” and “adaption” (qtd. in Plock 20)—that is, the tension between individual identity and the uniformity implied by assimilation into a wider community—and she aims to demonstrate that fashion “provided [these writers] with a rich conceptual framework for analysing the complex processes of identity formation” (1).The fate of the individual in the age of conformity is one of the central concerns of many early twentieth-century writers and thinkers, seen in the vexed attempts at autonomy of fictional heroines such as Carrie Meeber and Lily Bart as much as in the work of Simmel. Simmel and various writers associated with the Frankfurt School are important figures for Plock, but it is Pierre Bourdieu's conjoining of “haute couture” and “haute culture” that is key to her argument, and she particularly highlights his observation of the “homology” between “fashion garments” and “the goods of legitimate culture such as music, poetry, [and] philosophy” (qtd. in Plock 2). This homology underpins Plock's project as a whole, and she forcefully demonstrates what these five women's writing can tell us about their own concerns regarding the relation of the individual to the collective, and the individual's capacity for originality in the machine age. Similarly, she also analyzes the ways in which the professionalization of authorship and the emergence of the figure of the “celebrity author” affected the “working practices” of these women writers (3).Plock frames this analysis as an “investigat[ion]” of how these writers, “who were very clearly interested in sartorial fashions, developed their novels and authorial personas in response to contemporary market demands” (2). This, then, is also a book about “the market,” and the emerging consumer capitalism of this period, and follows on from studies such as Alissa Karl's Modernism and the Marketplace: Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism (2009), Carey Mickalites's Modernism and Market Fantasy: British Fictions of Capital (2012), and Amy Kaplan's “Edith Wharton's Profession of Authorship” (in The Social Construction of American Realism, 1988). And, were this a study of five male writers of the period, one wonders whether it might simply have been called something like “Modernism and the Market,” regardless of “sartorial fashions.” Lest one suspect Plock of falling into a gender-essentializing trap, however, she explains that the gendered discourse around fashion limited the extent to which women writers could engage with the subject in their work without reinforcing gender stereotypes, or being dismissed as frivolous—and she explores the ways these writers appropriated this discourse to their own ends. In so doing, Plock aims to go further than recent work on modernism and fashion, and she is, as she tells us, one of the first to consider Wharton alongside both modernism and fashion as a “modern cultural condition” (43).The question of Wharton's relation to modernism has been much explored, most notably by Robin Peel and Jennifer Haytock, but Plock is nevertheless right to point out Wharton's absence from much of modernist studies, including that on modernism and material cultures. Wharton's inclusion here is explained not only by her “interest” in, and apparent opposition to, fashion, but also by her role as “an astute critic of modernism” (23, 25). Wharton is thus positioned in opposition to both modernism and fashion as “the grande dame of American realism” (25, 47). Yet Plock suggests that this opposition stems not from a place of reactionary conservatism, but from Wharton's “critical attitude towards an interwar publishing industry that commodified aesthetics” (25)—a reading of Wharton as a proto-Frankfurtian critic of the culture industry that, Plock notes, is new to scholars of both Wharton and modernism.In her first chapter, Plock addresses a range of Wharton's fiction, correspondence, and essays, particularly attending to those moments where Wharton's prose slips between sartorial, economic, and aesthetic metaphors. Plock sees Wharton as discerning that modernist literature, like modern fashion, was driven by a “veneration of novelty” (39) that, paradoxically, led to ever more pernicious standardization—avant-garde works such as Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway were not so much distinguished by their authors' imprimatur, as united by the leveling, market-driven, and ahistorical determination to “make it new,” at all costs.1 In contrast, Wharton's theory of artistic individuality and aesthetic value was rooted in a sense of “everlasting laws” that “condition beautiful things and forms,” and “she … regarded fashion disapprovingly as a destructive dynamic that problematically unsettled the relationship between commerce and aesthetics, between deep-seated beauty and cheap originality” (46, 47). The consequences of fashion's “destructive” force are far reaching—and Plock's final chapter on Woolf links its fostering of a flimsy “originality” with a drive toward uniformity in aesthetics and politics, and the 1930s slide into fascism.Wharton is to a certain extent an outlier for Plock in that, although ambivalent about fashion, and concerned about its capacity to act as an agent of uniformity, she did not (in Plock's terms) identify it as an “envoy of patriarchal modes of thinking” (219), as did Rhys and Lehmann, and, to a lesser extent, Woolf. A lively and lucid chapter on the still-understudied Rhys tracks the author's engagement with the interwar fashion industry. Plock argues that, in stories such as “Mannequin” (1927), the protagonist of which has to stand “motionless ‘for an hour to have a dress draped on her’” (79), Rhys critiques the exploitation of young women by the same fashion industry that purported to offer sartorial and consumerist liberation. In the many of Rhys's texts which end with a young woman destroyed and destitute, Plock sees an indictment of fashion's “seductive … narratives of advancement, transformation and improvement” (74), as well as a “pessimistic counterpoint to narratives about women's emancipation in the 1920s and 1930s” (75).In her chapter on the equally neglected Rosamond Lehmann, Plock focuses on Invitation to the Waltz (1932), suggesting that the novel's intertextual references to Vogue, on the one hand, and To the Lighthouse (1927), on the other, demonstrate Lehmann's careful negotiation of the line between “modernist experimentation” and “commercial marketability” (112), while also critiquing the uniformity demanded by contemporary fashion. By contrast, Plock argues, Elizabeth Bowen saw in fashion not only the dangers of a mass-produced conformity, but also the possibility of “creative … self-expression” (27). Plock suggests that Bowen carefully curated her authorial persona, maintaining her reputation for literary experimentation (and “difficulty”) even as she “began to occupy a more central place in the literary field of the interwar period” (165). Woolf, meanwhile, in works such as The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938), addressed the question of “how clothes and other sartorial objects constructed identity and coordinated individuals in social settings and configurations” (182). Together these chapters provide a welcome demonstration of how we might see these five writers together as thinking through the dilemmas and dangers of modern fashion.One of the few points that Wharton scholars may take issue with, however, is that Plock seems to see Wharton in the early years of her career as almost entirely detached from the commercial machinery of the publishing world, noting that it was “after the First World War” that “writing bec[a]me a very profitable occupation” for her (61), and only in the 1920s and 1930s that, “ironically,” the author “bec[ame] a bestselling novelist” and started to “demand from her publisher exactly the kind of publicity that she had rebuked twenty years earlier” (62). Yet Wharton was in fact demanding this very publicity (from Scribner's, John Murray, and Macmillan) from the earliest days of her career, even as she seemed to publicly rebuke it. Equally, Wharton became a bestselling novelist long before the First World War—in 1905, with the huge commercial success of The House of Mirth. Wharton was always already embroiled in the very culture industry that she also affected to critique; 1899 saw her approve an advertising blurb for a Philadelphia department store that titillatingly referred to her “wealth” and “first-hand intercourse with fashion” (Lee 172), and while she may have later criticized the “exhibitionism” of the photographs advertising Orlando, she herself had long consented to her photograph being used to sell her work. The many pieces of Wharton's writing that pose questions about publicity, literary value, and the commercialization of the written word must be seen as coming from a writer who was negotiating her own place within this world, as opposed to one who was (or even one who thought she was) surveying it from a rarefied, uncompromised moral high ground. Compelling as it is, Plock's discussion of Wharton's relationship to fashion, novelty, and an ever more commercialized literary “market” would be even more cogent had it acknowledged, and accounted for, both these contexts and the full nuances and apparent contradictions of Wharton's own authorial standpoint. Plock's study might too have profited by situating Wharton's criticism of the commercialization of literature in the light of the American publishing industry and intellectual milieu in which the author began her career; comparable critiques, such as those by William Dean Howells (“The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” [1893]) and Hamlin Garden (“Sanity in Fiction” [1903]), would also have provided further useful non-European context for the volume.In a sense, the chapter on Wharton acts as an extension of Plock's setting up, in her introduction, of the terms of her debate, and, in particular, in outlining exactly what she means by “fashion”—along with Simmel, Baudelaire, et cetera, Wharton becomes one more nineteenth-century cultural critic. The chapters on Rhys, Lehmann, Bowen, and Woolf, meanwhile, seem to be rooted in a more in-depth use of archival material, and a more thorough tying together of this material with both these authors' writing and their historical contexts. Nevertheless, this is a complex, highly stimulating, provocative, and, at times, challenging reading of Wharton's relationship to the literary marketplace and consumer capitalism, for which Plock's “fashion” often seems to act as a proxy. The invitation to consider Wharton as an early critic of high capitalism's cultural practices and production will prove constructive for many, while the bracketing of her as an “interwar” writer who was deeply engaged with debates around literary modernism furthers the ongoing challenge to the traditional categorization of Wharton as belonging to the fin de siècle.