This is wonderful. I love reading about a writer's influences; it pushes me to revisit some favorite books and find new appreciation. I haven't read her biography but will put it on my TBR list.
I just finished House of Mirth (my first Wharton!) last month and was swept away by the scope of her talent. I love the POV idea for your novel. I'll check it out!
I share your admiration for Edith Wharton. She is a very perceptive writer who astutely analyses the problems for women of her era in a very restrictive society. I published a scholarly article about one of her short stories: “Ghosts and Marital Estrangement: An Analysis of ‘Afterward’” in the Edith Wharton Review 10.1 (1993): pages 18-19. Best wishes for your new book! Janet
Lev can you recommend a novel of hers? Because I struggled with Ethan Fromme and never went back. But then I also hate Dreiser except for Sister Carrie and the Cowperwood trilogy. These are riveting portrayals of the same Gilded era. The rest of his work is forgettable.
Thanks Lev. I'll do it. What I was saying is a great writer can write really bad. Or badly, or whatever. If your first exposure to Hemingway is For Whom the Bell Tolls, you are unlikely to return, missing out on two of the greatest novels ever written (The Sun and A Farewell).
There's no comparison between Dreiser and Wharton. She was a wonderful prose writer, witty, insightful. Dreiser was a behemoth who needed better editing.
Ethan Frome is a very dark, very nightmarish book about being utterly and completely trapped by fate and it stands out from the rest of EW's work--and it's very much about shame. My essay about that aspect is in the Norton Critical Edition of EF.
Thanks Lev I will read Wharton. I must however disagree on placing Wharton over Dreiser. Dreiser was a trailblazer. Along with Crane and London, he modernized the language, scouring away pretense and laying the groundwork for Hemingway, and all that followed. Dreiser sounds modern, at least in the books I mentioned. Wharton not so much, but I'll be checking this out.
I've read all of Wharton at least once and have shelves of secondary work and nobody before her was writing about women in the way she did. Dreiser to me is an elephant compared to Hemingway the race horse. :-)
But we can't really compare EW and Dreiser because she was writing Realism and he was writing Naturalism. They're both major American writers, but in different schools.
EW wrote about Gilded Age New York as it was and then went on in the Twenties to record that era's craziness too. She blazed trails too.
I'll read the short stories and you read Sister Carrie. Doubtless again, so maybe just the last third, when Hurstwood is crushed under the Darwinian wheels of NYC, lonely, half-insane, a man once of standing and ease who is now a wretch and beggar. Wharton write anything like that?
Congrats, Lev. My HS English teacher told us Ethan Frome was her favorite novel and then I though that had to do with living in a similar landscape, but when I read it as an adult it was far more revealing.
When I taught a Wharton/Sinclair Lewis course at MSU, the class loved Ethan Frome because it was so dark. This was at the height of fan attention to The Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.
I had no idea that you wrote a historical novel. As a fellow Edith Wharton fan, I’m putting this on my list!
Enjoy! And BTW, I have a long personal essay about EW's influence on my life due in the next Edith Wharton Review.
This is wonderful. I love reading about a writer's influences; it pushes me to revisit some favorite books and find new appreciation. I haven't read her biography but will put it on my TBR list.
Have fun!
I just finished House of Mirth (my first Wharton!) last month and was swept away by the scope of her talent. I love the POV idea for your novel. I'll check it out!
I hope you enjoy it.
Dear Lev,
I share your admiration for Edith Wharton. She is a very perceptive writer who astutely analyses the problems for women of her era in a very restrictive society. I published a scholarly article about one of her short stories: “Ghosts and Marital Estrangement: An Analysis of ‘Afterward’” in the Edith Wharton Review 10.1 (1993): pages 18-19. Best wishes for your new book! Janet
My retrospective on how she changed my life will be in the next EW Review, Janet. And I studied her ghost stories while working on "Lost in London": http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue987/lost_london1.html
Although it is unlikely my NYC family was included in her social circle, I have loved her writing since my first exposure to her books.
Nor mine, and I could say the same about James, but Washington Square in junior high was the beginning of a lifetime's devotion.
Lev can you recommend a novel of hers? Because I struggled with Ethan Fromme and never went back. But then I also hate Dreiser except for Sister Carrie and the Cowperwood trilogy. These are riveting portrayals of the same Gilded era. The rest of his work is forgettable.
Try reading a collection of her short stories set in New York. https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-new-york-stories-of-edith-wharton
Thanks Lev. I'll do it. What I was saying is a great writer can write really bad. Or badly, or whatever. If your first exposure to Hemingway is For Whom the Bell Tolls, you are unlikely to return, missing out on two of the greatest novels ever written (The Sun and A Farewell).
There's no comparison between Dreiser and Wharton. She was a wonderful prose writer, witty, insightful. Dreiser was a behemoth who needed better editing.
Ethan Frome is a very dark, very nightmarish book about being utterly and completely trapped by fate and it stands out from the rest of EW's work--and it's very much about shame. My essay about that aspect is in the Norton Critical Edition of EF.
Thanks Lev I will read Wharton. I must however disagree on placing Wharton over Dreiser. Dreiser was a trailblazer. Along with Crane and London, he modernized the language, scouring away pretense and laying the groundwork for Hemingway, and all that followed. Dreiser sounds modern, at least in the books I mentioned. Wharton not so much, but I'll be checking this out.
I've read all of Wharton at least once and have shelves of secondary work and nobody before her was writing about women in the way she did. Dreiser to me is an elephant compared to Hemingway the race horse. :-)
But we can't really compare EW and Dreiser because she was writing Realism and he was writing Naturalism. They're both major American writers, but in different schools.
EW wrote about Gilded Age New York as it was and then went on in the Twenties to record that era's craziness too. She blazed trails too.
I'll read the short stories and you read Sister Carrie. Doubtless again, so maybe just the last third, when Hurstwood is crushed under the Darwinian wheels of NYC, lonely, half-insane, a man once of standing and ease who is now a wretch and beggar. Wharton write anything like that?
This is what a true literary love affair looks like.
Congrats, Lev. My HS English teacher told us Ethan Frome was her favorite novel and then I though that had to do with living in a similar landscape, but when I read it as an adult it was far more revealing.
When I taught a Wharton/Sinclair Lewis course at MSU, the class loved Ethan Frome because it was so dark. This was at the height of fan attention to The Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.
I loved Ethan Frome, too.
Have you read her "pendant" novel, Summer? Polar opposite. Likewise dealing with one of Wharton's themes, shame, but deeply sexual.