Edith Wharton was my kind of rebel: A quiet, well-behaved one. She tended to take practices that were rigidly defined by the Victorian society in which she grew up (entertaining, decorating, traveling, learning, gardening) and “rewrite”them according to her own specifications. In a recent issue of Slate Magazine, Kate Bolick takes a close look at… [Read More]
Ladies and Not-So Gentle Women by Alfred Allan Lewis Reviewed by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
April 2, 2014 By
Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women;Elisabeth Marbury,Anne Morgan, Elsie de Wolfe, Anne Vanderbilt, and Their Times by Alfred Allan Lewis. Penguin, 2000. 540 pages; $18.00 (paperback). Reading level: adult. Four big-spending Gilded Age women would seem to have nothing to contribute to the rough and tumble politics of women’s rights near the turn of the 20th century. … [Read More]
Edith Wharton in the Magazine Popular Science
March 11, 2013 By
I’ve gotten used to seeing Edith Wharton’s name all over the place but when I found out she’d popped up in the magazine Popular Science, I really had to check it out. Before I hit the link, I took some guesses on what her scientific connection might be. One possibility: She was intrigued by Charles… [Read More]
Julian Fellowes on Edith Wharton
February 27, 2013 By
I know both Downton Abbey and Edith Wharton fans will appreciate this article from the Berkshire Eagle in which Julian Fellowes, the writer of Downton Abbey talks about how his late-in-life reading of two Wharton novels inspired first his failed writing venture, then Gosford Park and then, of course, Downton Abbey. “She observes but she… [Read More]
The Doorway to High Society
January 21, 2013 By
In Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age New York, the new-money people were storming the gates of High Society and the Old Guard (people of birth, background, and breeding) were making a vain attempt to keep those gates firmly closed. Today, Society is open to all comers! The only requirement to entry is the desire to become… [Read More]
Diana Morón Meets Edith Wharton
January 7, 2013 By
When I wrote The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton, I was hoping the book would be discovered by high school teachers and used to introduce a new generation of readers to Edith Wharton. You can imagine my delight when Diana Morón, a sophomore at Porterville High School in Porterville, California, introduced herself to me by… [Read More]
More Letters From Edith!
May 9, 2012 By
Just as my Edith Wharton biography was going to press, a stash of letters from Edith to her governess (and later secretary) was discovered. How can I get my hands on those? I wondered. The answer wasn’t long in coming. In April of 2011, when I spoke at The Mount, I met Irene Goldman-Price who… [Read More]
A Response to Jonathan Franzen: Edith Wharton Was Hard (But Not Impossible) to Like
March 12, 2012 By
Responses to Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker article “A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the problem of sympathy” are flying fast and furious. He claims Edith Wharton is just plain hard to like as a person – hard to sympathize with as he puts it – and after spending years in her company while writing her… [Read More]
“Loud Voices”
November 14, 2011 By
Lucretia Jones could not have had an easy time raising her daughter Edith. She was a woman of average intelligence and superficial interests suddenly confronted by a child whose brilliance was apparent from the get-go. She probably tried valiantly to maintain her maternal authority and, if her daughter’s claim that pleasing her mother and pleasing… [Read More]
Up and Coming Writers
June 6, 2011 By
Those of us involved with books – writers, editors, librarians, teachers – worry a lot about the whole reading and writing process. Will there be people in the next generation willing to read challenging literature? Will there be people in the next generation who can write articulately? I can name one for sure. She is… [Read More]