Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country:

A Reassessment

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Editor: Laura Rattray

Gender and Genre

During her lifetime, Edith Wharton was one of America’s most popular and prolific writers, publishing over forty books and winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But after her death her work slipped out of favour, and it is only in the last thirty years that her reputation as a literary heavyweight and a great writer has recovered.

Bringing together twelve leading Wharton scholars from Europe and North America, this volume offers the first ever collection of essays on Wharton’s 1913 tour de force, The Custom of the Country. Described as 'her greatest book' by Hermione Lee in her acclaimed 2007 biography of the writer, and listed by Wharton herself at the end of a long and prolific career as one of her own favourite works, The Custom of the Country arguably remains the author’s most complex and controversial novel. The contributions to this collection demonstrate the continuing evolution of Wharton scholarship within modern critical approaches.

Sample pages

• The Custom of the Country: Introduction
• The Custom of the Country: Index

Readership

Literature, Gender Studies

Contents

Introduction – Laura Rattray
1 The Custom of the Country: Edith Wharton’s Conversation with The Atlantic Monthly – Susan Goodman
2 When the Reading Had to Stop: Readers, Reading and the Circulation of Texts in The Custom of the Country – Shafquat Towheed
3 ‘Don’t cry – it ain’t that kind of a story...’: Wharton’s Business of Fiction, 1908–1912 – Bonnie Shannon McMullen
4 Worst Parents Ever: Cultures of Childhood in The Custom of the Country – Carol J Singley
5 Crude Ascending the Staircase: Undine Spragg and The Armory Show – Emily J Orlando
6 ‘It’s Better to Watch’: Compulsive Voyeurism in The Custom of the Country and House of Mirth – Jessica Schubert McCarthy
7 A ‘mist of Opopanax’: Mapping the Scentscape of The Custom of the Country – Pamela Knights
8 Landscape with the Fall of Undine – Margaret P Murray
9 Girls from the Provinces: Wharton’s Undine Spragg and Cather’s Thea Kronborg – Julie Olin-Ammentorp
10 Men at Work in The Custom of the Country – William Blazek
11 'Lost in Translation': Financial Plots and the Modernist Reader in The Custom of the Country – Hildegard Hoeller

Related titles

• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part IV: Henry James, Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde by their Contemporaries
• The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton

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