Edith Wharton in the News

Lying on the couch at the Mount

2009-06-28T12:19:00.001-07:00

From Slate:

More recently, on a visit to Edith Wharton's country house in Lenox, Mass., I ducked into the empty living room and stretched out on the sofa, nap-style: Will regarding the ceiling from such an oddly intimate angle disclose a previously overlooked insight into the great woman herself? Only later did I stop to think that Wharton probably wasn't the napping type.

Edith Wharton letters

2009-06-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

Edith Wharton Predicts Her Future

A trove of 136 Edith Wharton letters—some written when Wharton was just fourteen years old—sold at Christie’s yesterday to an American educational institution for $182,500. It’s a tremendous treat for Wharton aficionados, because prior to this discovery—as Rebecca Mead points out in her essay this week—there was only one known letter by Wharton from before she was married, at the age of twenty-three, in 1885.

Mead explains that Wharton asked Anna Bahlmann, her governess and the recipient of the letters, to destroy them. But she didn’t, and Bahlmann’s niece, who inherited them, held on to them, too. They sat for some fifty years in an attic and for another forty in a safe-deposit box. The Christie’s auction is the first time the letters have been publicly shared.

A friend of mine pointed out that Edith Wharton’s first novella, published in 1900, is eerily apt. “The Touchstone” tells the story of a betrayal committed by an impoverished lawyer named Stephen Glennard, who is hoping to marry his beautiful and equally impoverished fiancée. By chance, Glennard discovers that he can sell the love letters written to him earlier by the famous late writer Margaret Aubyn. They sell for a hefty price, allowing Glennard and his fiancée to wed. But Glennard is preoccupied with the guilt over the sale, and feels incapable of overcoming his sense of shame and betrayal to Aubyn.

Wharton's letters

2009-06-25T18:40:00.001-07:00

There's a slide show of Edith Wharton's letters over at The New Yorker; the article is only in the print version, unfortunately.

Edith Wharton-Anna Bahlmann letters

2009-06-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

From the Christie's catalog:

Lot Description

WHARTON, Edith Newbold Jones (1862-1937). An extensive archive documenting her 42-year relationship with Anna Catherine Bahlmann (1849-1916), originally Edith's German language tutor, later her secretary and literary assistant. Comprising: 136 AUTOGRAPH LETTERS SIGNED ("E.N. Jones," "Herz" [heart], "E.W." etc), to Bahlmann ("Tonni"), various places (PenCraig, Rhode Island; The Mount, Lenox, Mass.; Venice, Paris, Rome, Washington Square, NY, etc.), 31 May 1874 - 15 September 1917. Includes one ALS from Edward ("Teddy") Robbins Wharton and 4 ALS of Edith Wharton to Bahlmann's niece after Anna Catherine's death. Some of the letters are quite lengthy, running to 8 and even 12 pages, 8vo and 12mo. (Many of Edith Wharton's letters with full transcripts).

[With:] BAHLMANN'S PERSONAL PAPERS AND EFFECTS: 24 letters from
various correspondents including Henry James (8/14/05); effects including clippings, programs, poems by acquaintances, typescript articles, a last will and testament, pamphlets on war-relief, ledgers and notebooks, a small sachet with ink drawing of young girl labeled "E.N. Jones 1875" etc. [With:] POSTCARDS: 46 from Edith and Anna Catherine's trip to North Africa, 1914; 278 additional postcards of European places and monuments.[With:] PHOTOGRAPHS: 25 pieces, many labeled by Bahlmann on verso, including portraits of Edith Wharton and other acquaintances, a number of large-format views and interior photographs of the Mount, 884 Park Avenue and other homes.

EDITH WHARTON'S LETTERS TO ANNA CATHERINE BAHLMANN: A HIGHLY IMPORTANT LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE, ENTIRELY UNPUBLISHED.

In about 1872, Edith's parents, on the suggestion of their Newport neighbors, the Lewis Rutherfurds, hired Anna Catherine Bahlmann (1849-1916), a young women of German ancestry, as tutor and later governess to the precocious 12-year-old Edith Newbold Jones, a voracious reader with strong literary inclinations. Their friendship became a close, enduring one. Years later, Edith Wharton spoke of Anna Bahlmann as "my beloved German teacher, who saw which way my fancy turned, and fed it with all the wealth of German literature, from the Minnesingers to Heine" (A Backward Glance, Lib. of America edn., p.820). In the following decades, Anna Catherine became Edith's confidant, critical reader and literary assistant. Bahlmann's influence on Wharton has remained unknown, but is richly documented in their extensive and entirely unpublished correspondence, which spans 1874 to Bahlmann's death in 1916. Its discovery permits significant new insights into the life and and literary work of Wharton.

The introduction to the Letters, ed. R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis, refers to "the oldest surviving" Wharton letter, dated 23 September 1874. The earliest letter in the Bahlmann archive (31 May 1874), pre-dates it by four months. "Almost twenty years must pass," the Lewises write, "before another letter by Edith Wharton comes into view." Remarkably, over forty of Wharton's letters in the Bahlmann archive are dated before 1894, thus filling in a major gap in Wharton's extant correspondence.

The early letters are filled with enthusiasm for her reading, which includes Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Longfellow's "Masque of Pandora," Edward Bulwer (whose work she disliked), the Eddas, Marlowe's Faustus, the Niebelungen, Milton, Shelley and Lowell's blank verse. "You are my supreme critic in these matters," she tells Bahlmann (10/17ca.1879). She notes when her own work is published, like an early sonnet, "St. Martin's Summer," for Scribner's; four poems for Atlantic (10/16/79), her popular "The Fulness of Life" (8/18/1891), a story "That Good May Come" (11/15/93) recalling "the hours we spent in writing it out together"; remarks that the The House of Mirth is having "unprecedented success" in the Revue de Paris (12/18/1907), and in a letter of 8/16/1913 asks Bahlmannn to suggest revisions of Custom of the Country.

[Read the rest at the above link. The letters went for $182,500]

The Mount in Victoria Magazine

2009-06-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

In the comments section on the post for getting The Mount on the quarter, Gina noted that Victoria magazine has a photo spread on The Mount--thanks for letting us know!

http://www.victoriamag.com/article.aspx?id=5824

Edith Wharton and American Psycho

2009-06-13T16:06:00.000-07:00

Walter Benn Michaels at Book Forum:

If American Psycho harks back to the great novels of Edith Wharton—novels of manners in which the hierarchy of the social order is always what’s at stake—The Wire is like a reinvention of Zola or Dreiser for a world in which the deification of the market is going out rather than coming in. Although, of course, you had to pay the HBO subscription fee to watch it.

John Edwards as Ethan Frome?

2009-05-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

Politics Italian-style looked particularly comical and benign this past week as Americans relived John Edwards’s marital betrayal on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in all its sad, sordid detail. Elizabeth Edwards, who has written a book, “Resilience,” about her personal trials, told all to Ms. Winfrey while her penitent husband slunk to another part of their North Carolina mansion, waiting his turn to answer to Ms. Winfrey — an Ethan Frome of his former self.

Dramatic adaptation of A Son at the Front

2009-05-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

From Broadway World

A Son at the Front, an original play by Allen Frantzen, will have its world premiere performances June 5, 6, and 7 at the Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago. Based on Edith Wharton's poignant novel about World War I, A Son at the Front explores the effects of war on the family and friends of a young man who is eager to do his duty. Frantzen has enlarged on Wharton's themes, crafting a story of an American home front torn by divisions over the nation's role in the raging European conflict, and a family torn by disagreement about a son's destiny.

Set in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in 1916 and 1917, the action plays out against the many strains that roiled public life: conflicts between rich and poor, capitalists and socialists, war resisters and a growing tide of anti-German feeling, Native Americans and neighbors with roots in Europe. A Son at the Front tells of the fate of a young man who signs up to be an ambulance driver in France even before America's formal entry into the war, and who subsequently enters the fighting. Meanwhile, his family and friends struggle to piece together their partial and differing understandings of his actions, his whereabouts, and his motivations, viewing events through conflicting perceptions of the young man himself and their own aspirations for him.
Additional information is available at sonatthefront.com.

Louis Auchincloss, Mrs. Astor, and Edith Wharton

2009-05-01T11:57:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

In his testimony, Mr. Auchincloss also described a lunch some 60 years later that he said had troubled him because she did not recognize him.

The lunch, at the Knickerbocker Club, took place in 2001, he said. “It was a great shock to me because she didn’t know me,” Mr. Auchincloss testified. “She knew she ought to know me.”

He said it was not the first time he had wondered about her. He said that in 1998, Mrs. Astor took part in a discussion about Edith Wharton at the Union Club and said she had known Wharton.

“This was astonishing to me,” Mr. Auchincloss said. “I’d written a biography of Edith Wharton. She had told me, which I knew to be true, that she’d never met Edith Wharton. She could have, but I happened to know she hadn’t.”

Nominations needed for EWS Executive Board and EWS Secretary

2009-04-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

From Laura Rattray, Nominations Chair:

Nominations are warmly invited for the EWS Executive Board and Secretary Positions. Please send completed forms to Laura Rattray by email (L.Rattray@hull.ac.uk) by the deadline of 1 July 2009. Further details available at http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/nominationform2.htm (http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/nominationform2.htm)

Lily Bart and pride

2009-04-07T17:54:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times, "Mind--When All You Have Left Is Your Pride":

The various flavors of pride may even feel similar on the inside, when the stakes are high enough. “She was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself,” wrote Edith Wharton of her tragic heroine Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth.” “Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed doors she did not open.” If you believe it, so will they.

Edith Wharton in the News: The Mount on SciFi and Age of Innocence on Gossip Girl

2009-03-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

>From Irene Goldman-Price:
Edith Wharton's home in the Berkshires, The Mount, is the subject of an episode of GhostHunters on the SciFi channel. The episode airs on March 25, 2009, at 9 p.m.EDT. http://www.scifi.com/ghosthunters/

>From Emily Orlando and Jessica McCarthy:
The show _Gossip Girl_ (on the CW network), which frequently referencesWharton and her works in its themes, recently devoted an episode to a schoolproduction of _The Age of Innocence_. The episode is available here:http://www.cwtv.com/cw-video/gossip-girl/full/?play=423-5376

Anna Quindlen on Edith Wharton

2009-03-05T11:07:00.001-08:00

From the Buffalo News:

Quindlen, who has written more than a dozen books, said she has always been a voracious reader.

“I have a copy of Edith Wharton’s ‘House of Mirth’ that looks like a middle schooler had lunch on it,” she said.

“I believe with all my heart that reading made me what I am today. It has made me a better writer, a better citizen and a better mother. I can’t imagine my life without reading,” Quindlen added.

The Mount on the quarter

2009-02-12T10:02:00.000-08:00

From EWS member Irene Goldman-Price:

Help Us Put The Mount on the Quarter!

We’re usually asking you to give us a quarter, but today we want you to put us ON the quarter!

Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Mint will be placing important national sites on the back of the quarter, and The Mount has a chance to be chosen. Please follow this link and vote for us:

http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=gov3utilities&sid=Agov3&U=quarters_program

You may vote as often as you like until the deadline of February 26. There’s a lot of competition, but it would certainly be a great honor and would give us incomparable publicity. Many thanks for your support!

********

There is additional information at a new blog, Help Save The Mount! This blog has great information about the activities and lectures at the Mount as well as a direct link for donations.

Edith Wharton's birthplace

2008-12-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times

LIKE several of its neighbors on West 23rd Street, the five-story structure at No. 14 began life as a brownstone but later was converted for commercial use. For many years the ground-floor tenant was Scott’s Flowers, which had three permanent residents: two enormous stuffed bears and a midsize gray-and-white cat named Scottie.

Picture History, 1880

Edith Wharton’s birthplace as it once appeared.

Each morning the bears were hauled out to sun themselves on a bench in front of the shop, and Scottie emerged to plop himself down on the sidewalk and invite passers-by to scratch his back.

In 2007, Scott’s Flowers, along with Scottie, decamped to a new location. The new tenant is a Starbucks. And Starbucks, in the process of reconfiguring a flower shop into a coffee bar, has accidentally recreated a lost vista from the childhood of an earlier resident of No. 14, a little girl known as Pussy Jones, who grew up to be Edith Wharton.

No plaque proclaims the connection. But somewhere behind No. 14’s cast-iron facade stands the shell of the brownstone where Wharton was born on Jan. 24, 1862. In Wharton’s novella “New Year’s Day,” the narrator recalls a visit to his grandmother’s house on 23rd Street, clearly modeled on Wharton’s childhood home.

The house, Wharton writes, had been built by the narrator’s grandfather “in his pioneering youth, in days when people shuddered at the perils of living north of Union Square — days that Grandmamma and my parents looked back to with a joking incredulity as the years passed and the new houses advanced steadily Park-ward, outstripping the Thirtieth Streets, taking the Reservoir at a bound, and leaving us in what, in my school days, was already a dullish back-water between Aristocracy to the south and Money to the north.”

Directly across the street from No. 14 is the south entrance of 200 Fifth Avenue, an office building erected in 1909 on the site of the recently demolished Fifth Avenue Hotel. The office building was constructed according to the hotel’s plan, so its south entrance is located in the same place as the hotel’s, which was directly across the street from the parlor of Wharton’s home.

“She was bad ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.” Thus begins “New Year’s Day,” as the narrator’s waspish mother reiterates her disapproval of the notorious Lizzie Hazeldean, whose affair with Henry Prest had scandalized New York society. The reference to the famous old hotel reminds the narrator that when he was a boy, he had witnessed Lizzie’s downfall himself. It happened on a New Year’s Day in the 1870s, when his family had gathered at the house on 23rd Street, and their luncheon was interrupted by shouts that the Fifth Avenue Hotel was on fire.

“The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable,” he tells us. “No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by ‘politicians’ and ‘Westerners,’ two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.”

IN real life, the power brokers who frequented the Fifth Avenue Hotel were the people who ran the country during the Gilded Age. But Wharton did not label this the Age of Innocence for no reason. Oblivious to their own irrelevance, the aristocrats of “New Year’s Day” look down their noses at the overdressed and underbred revelers who converge on the Fifth Avenue to celebrate the holiday.

When the fire starts, the family rushes into the parlor to chortle at the hotel guests spilling out onto the sidewalk in their vulgar finery: “Oh, my dear, look — here they all come! The New Year ladies! Low neck and short sleeves in broad daylight, every one of them! Oh, and the fat one with the paper roses in her hair ... they are paper, my dear ... off the frosted cake, probably! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” Then someone recognizes Lizzie and Henry among those smoked out by the blaze, and the novella’s plot kicks into gear.

Jane Smiley, Edith Wharton, Jose Saramago

2008-12-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20081221_An_author_pondering__not_fearing__death.html
In her book about writing fiction (still a good guide, I think), Edith Wharton says a novelist's main job is to think about his or her subject thoroughly. If she had said unexpectedly, charmingly, profoundly, imaginatively and simply, too, she would have been describing José Saramago in Death With Interruptions.

Katy Lederer on Galbraith and Wharton

2008-12-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

"Ballad of the Bubble" in The New Yorker:
Then, in 2004, she spent a month at Yaddo. For reading, she took along study materials for the Series 7 stockbroker’s exam, as well as books by Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith. “Veblen talks about poetry as being similar to Latin, useless and a waste of time,” she said. “It’s a form of conspicuous consumption.” Still, Lederer said, she was struck by the metaphors he and Galbraith used. “The language is gorgeous,” she said. “Like Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, Galbraith is witty and sarcastic.” She started to crib phrases like “dead-level,” “squirrel wheel,” and “immiseration of the masses” for her verse.

Julian Fellowes on Edith Wharton

2008-12-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

From One Minute with Julian Fellowes:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you like her/him

Anthony Trollope and Edith Wharton. I like that they're so merciful. No character is completely indefensible, or completely good. Motives are always drawn in shades of grey.

Louis Auchincloss and Wharton

2008-12-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

Last of the Old Guard

Louis Auchincloss’s 65th novel finds relevance in Wall Street attorneys of a bygone era.
By Heller McAlpin | December 15, 2008 edition

Last of the Old Guard By Louis Auchincloss Houghton Mifflin 212 pp., $25

Some people make the rest of us look like idlers. Case in point: Louis Auchincloss, who has written, on average, a book a year for six decades – even while practicing trust and estate law full-time for more than 40 of those years.

At 91, he’s produced his 65th book overall and 47th volume of fiction, Last of the Old Guard. The title refers to Ernest Saunders, a chilly New York attorney whose greatest passion is the law firm he founded with a Harvard classmate in 1883.

But Auchincloss, who was honored as a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy back in 2000, may well feel like the last of the old guard himself.

There’s something oddly comforting about reading this patrician novelist of manners, successor to Edith Wharton. You know, to a certain degree, what you’ll be served – rather like eating at an exclusive social club.

Hauntings at The Mount

2008-11-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

Hauntings at The Mount
Updated: 10/31/2008 04:58 PM
By: Ryan Burgess

LENOX, Mass. -- "I've been alone in the building, very late at night, dark and it is extremely creepy," said The Mount tour guide Laurie Foote.

Slamming doors and creaky floors, they're the spooky sounds of a haunted jaunt with ghosts who want to scare you. This is a real-life mansion in Lenox that some say has been haunted for years. It's the storied home of novelist Edith Wharton, called The Mount, a place where workers who lived on the fourth floor never wanted to be alone.

"They lived up in these rooms and downstairs and they were all absolutely convinced that there were ghosts here because they would hear huge creeks and slamming doors and people walking down the hallway," said Foote. [read more at the link above]

Glimpses of the Moon Musical

2008-11-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

From Photo Flash:

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON, a Jazz Age musical with book & lyrics by Tajlei Levis and music by John Mercurio, choreographed by Denis Jones, and directed by Marc Bruni, premiered with a sold-out run in the Oak Room last winter. GLIMPSES OF THE MOON is back by popular demand for an ongoing run at Off-Broadway's Oak Room in the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street, between 5th and 6th Ave.). Performances began Sunday, October 26.

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON is based on one of Edith Wharton's rare comedies. Set in 1922, an age of anything but innocence, GLIMPSES OF THE MOON follows the jazzy whirl of Manhattan society. With plenty of friends, but little money, Susy Branch and her friend Nick Lansing devise a clever scheme to live beyond their means. They'll marry and live off the wedding gifts, while they help one another trade up to suitable millionaires. The plan works perfectly - until they fall in love.

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON stars Autumn Hurlbert (Legally Blonde) as Susy, and Chris Peluso (Mamma Mia and Lestat) as Nick, also starring is Jane Blass (Hairspray Nat'l Tour) as Ellie, Laura Jordan (Cry Baby and In My Life) as Coral, Daren Kelly (Crazy for You, Woman of the Year, Deathtrap, South Pacific) as Nelson and Glenn Peters as Streffy. The understudies are Russell Arden Koplin (Les Miserables and James Joyce's The Dead) and Matt Lutz.

GLIMPSES OF THE MOON plays every Monday at 8 pm. Doors open at 6:00 PM and seating is general admission. Final seating for dinner service is at 6:30 PM. Doors close at 7:30 PM and there is no late seating permitted.

Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman design nurseries

2008-11-16T11:15:00.000-08:00

From The Wall Street Journal:

This impulse isn't new or entirely bad. In "The Decoration of Houses" (1897), Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman devote a chapter to the design of the nursery and schoolroom. In a bossy but effective tone, Wharton laments the "superfluous gimcrack" and floods of "bric-a-brac" that dominated children's rooms in her day. "The daily intercourse with poor pictures, trashy 'ornaments,' and badly designed furniture may, indeed, be fittingly compared with a mental diet of silly and ungrammatical story books." She singles out for special opprobrium the "bead-work cushions" and "mildewed Landseer prints of foaming, dying animals" that dotted the nation's nurseries. Wharton refuses to pander to childish tastes: She suggests Bronzino's portraits of the Medici babies and a few reproductions of Italian frescoes for a child's walls, for example, all meant to surround children with objects of quality.

As Wharton well understood, the home is where children are socialized and where their taste is first cultivated -- or corrupted.

Glimpses of the Moon

2008-11-16T11:13:00.000-08:00

From Huffington Post:

One of the more rueful lines in Glimpses of the Moon, a Jazz Age musical, is the carefree exchange between two women. The young, romance-seeking blonde asks: "Don't you believe in love?" Her more jaded friend snaps back: "I believe in Lehman Bros." In 1922, when Edith Wharton wrote those lines, everyone laughed. Today, they are met with a knowing sigh. Apparently, love is a safer bet.

At least, if you follow the Twenties romp now playing at the Algonquin's Oak Room.

Though the sight lines are a bit compromised, the musical was written specifically for the intimate room, long a cabaret favorite. Playing every Monday at 8 p.m. at the famed hotel, Glimpses of the Moon is a frothy concoction with a tart twist. The show is based on a Wharton book, an author known more for cutting social commentary than comedy. But there are lots of witty lines here, and the production nicely captures an era when the rich lived in a madcap whirl of money, affairs, endless champagne and a casual disregard for anything except their own fun.

Dance play of House of Mirth

2008-11-16T11:12:00.001-08:00

http://www.boston.com/ae/events/articles/2008/11/16/globe_west_best_bets/
Waltham: Choreographer Susan Dibble transforms a great work of literature into a dance play in her adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1905 novel "The House of Mirth." Titled "Tea and Flowers, Purity and Grace," the piece features 24 dances with a narrator (played by professional actor Nigel Gore). Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday and next Sunday at 2 p.m. in Brandeis University's Spingold Theater, 415 South St. $18-$20. 781-736-3400.

Saving The Mount

2008-11-09T13:51:00.001-08:00

Saving The Mount
By Clarence Fanto, Special to The Eagle
Article Launched: 11/09/2008 01:00:00 AM EST

Sunday, November 09
LENOX

She may turn out to be the savior of The Mount, the former home of novelist Edith Wharton that has been threatened with foreclosure since last winter over $9 million in debts.

Susan Wissler is seeking a solid financial footing by expanding the mission of Edith Wharton Restoration Inc., which owns the estate built in 1902. Wharton lived there until 1911.

That includes creating a new "Wharton Center for the Written Word," that will offer literary conferences, workshops and movies to the public, opening a terrace "cafe" to the public evenings in summer, and keeping the house open for tours on weekends through December.

Wissler was named interim executive director on March 29, after longtime chief Stephanie Copeland declined a Board of Trustees offer of a lesser position. In August, "interim" was removed from Wissler's title.

Although a six-month lifeline floated by The Mount's creditors, led by Berkshire Bank, expired on Oct. 31, "the threat of foreclosure has been forestalled as a result of the steady progress we've made this summer," Wissler said this past week. "Our banks and creditors have concluded that it makes the most sense to give us additional time to work out long-term restructuring plans.

Read the rest of the article at the Berkshire Eagle