“Wharton and the Romance Plot” describes the relationship among three of Wharton’s novels that are heavily indebted to romance conventions – The House of Mirth, The Reef, and Summer. The failure of each narrative to reach the happy ending of a wished-for marriage provides readers with one means of questioning the actions of each pair of carefully drawn characters: is the absence of a fairy-tale ending the fault of Lily or Selden? Anna or George? Charity or Lucius? As Wharton changes the conventions of romance, she asks the reader to do a different kind of reading, a more socially based critique, one dependent on expectations by gender. Literary history seems to have prejudiced readers against Wharton’s early women characters, yet Henry James saw all too clearly how noble Anna Leathe was. With Lily Bart dead, and Charity Royall summarily wed, the fact that Anna wins the lover she desires breaks the often-cliched romance plot in her favor.

This essay addresses the role of Greece in Edith Wharton’s representation of home as a topos of strong human and cultural bonds. While Wharton saw France as the epitome of this ideal, she found in Greece its most symbolic expression, one that she identified in The Odyssey and later developed into a narrative of cultural wandering and triumphant return. The essay examines Homeric-inspired tropes of wandering and return in The House of Mirth (1905) and The Children (1928), as well as non-fictional works, such as Wharton’s diary of the 1888 Vanadis cruise. Using archival resources, including Wharton’s undated poem “Penelope” and her impressions from the 1926 visit to Greece on the steam yacht Osprey, I argue that Wharton conceptualized Greece not only as the ancient cradle of Western civilization but also as a paradigm of cultural recovery and the antidote to modern forms of alienation and drift.