Volume 5, Number 11 · January 6, 1966
"Angel of Devastation"
By Eleanor Clark
The Two Lives of Edith Wharton
by Grace Kellogg
Appleton-Century, 332 pp., $7.95
Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship
by Millicent Bell
Braziller, 384 pp., $6.50
Edith Wharton 1862-1937
by Olivia Coolidge
Scribner's, 224 pp., $3.95
The Edith Wharton Reader
selected with an Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
Scribner's, 736 pp., $7.50
The Reef
by Edith Wharton, Introduction by Louis Auchincloss
Scribner's, 384 pp., $4.95
To say that there is something troubling about the current Edith Wharton revival, in so far as it is that, is not to say that the new flurry of interest in her is either inappropriate or unwelcome. Far from it. It is very refreshing indeed to be sent back to her best work and realize in a new perspective how good it really was, and in that sense all the recent contributions are something to be grateful for. To be sure, the whole business of literary resuscitations is skittish and often suspect—who is to get picked out of the ash can? when, and by whom? and why?—and it is complicated nowadays by the alarming numbers of graduate students in the population, all needing subjects for theses. But there is nothing phony about the subject in this case. Edith Wharton had done her time in the ash can, for reasons no more complex or unjust than usual, and in part for the valid reason that having been as good a writer as she was she ended up an astonishingly bad one, through quite a few years and volumes. She was due to be re-discovered, re-evaluated, re-read. What is disturbing is a certain strange vulgarity, of course in very genteel wrappings, that seems to lurk behind some of the treatment of the subject. The question it all raises is how far scholarship justifies, and literary understanding is furthered by, a kind of personal poking and prying that one would find indecent or even disgusting among one's private acquaintance.
Review, 3153 words
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