Introduction

Summary

Edith Wharton, who was never obscure or forgotten, has been rediscovered a number of times. In 1938, the year after she died, Edmund Wilson published a famous essay, “Justice to Edith Wharton,” because he felt that the notices at her death had underestimated her achievement. Between The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) she had attained, he thought, an intensity - the consequence of secret personal anguish - which made her “important during a period . . . when there were few American writers worth reading.” He deplored the lowering of her reputation by the effect of her later, inferior works, written when some of this anguish had passed. Unquestionably, Wharton's powers had waxed and waned, as Wilson said. But the life curve of her reputation, whether measured by critical blame or esteem or by popular success or failure had not been governed by the issue of literary achievement alone; it was her subject matter and presumed personal attitudes that chiefly provoked response.