Edith Wharton
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: How To Make Sure Your Writing Is Forgotten
Do you really want to have to listen from the grave as students discuss your themes and scholars analyze your syntax and trace your influence?
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Edith Wharton’s Lost Story
An unpublished Edith Wharton story was recently discovered at Yale University by Dr. Alice Kelly. It’s called “The Field of Honour” and is set during World War I: Wharton was very much engaged with the war, she worked for a…
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick talks about her new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, writing and the nuclear family, and whether women are finally people yet.
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Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
I never recoiled, in that first season, to hear the nice people on the bus say “beautiful baby,” to us in reverent tones. It’s a thanksgiving for safe passage, a prayer for all new defenseless things. But after a few months…
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Henry James & The Great YA Debate
Responding to the ongoing debate about whether or not American literature is saturated with young adult fiction (and if adults should read these novels), Christopher Beha, in the New Yorker, addresses A.O. Scott’s recent essay in the New York Times…
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Fictional Characters Are Not Your Friends
Critics who fault a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. In a cheekily titled BuzzFeed Books essay,…
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Seeing What Wharton Saw
Jason Diamond writes about how he came to a deeper understanding of Edith Wharton, her work, and the New York neighborhood where she grew up and which Diamond “once tried so hard to avoid.” Wharton is one of the few…
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Saturday History Lesson: That Time Edith Wharton Wrote Erotica
If you’ve never been to an archive, this is what it’s like: you will go mad from the hum of cranked up air-conditioning. You are usually only allowed to bring a pencil.
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Me Be Pretty One Day
When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought
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Edith Wharton’s Lost Letters
In the upcoming New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about Edith Wharton’s letters to her governess, Anna Bahlmann. “Wharton had requested that her letters be destroyed, but Bahlmann’s family ignored her wishes and, for the past ninety years, their correspondence sat…
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The Emperor’s Children
Joanna Smith Rakoff’s debut novel follows a group of friends through the trials and triumphs of post-college life in New York.