Subjects
The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton
Editor: Laura Rattray
The Pickering Masters
978 1 85196 897 8: 234x156mm: £195.00/$335.00
During her lifetime, Edith Wharton was America’s most popular and prolific writer. The social chronicler of her age, her international reputation was secured by triumphs such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, a work for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. More recently, an explosion of scholarly research and a spate of Hollywood adaptations of her books have assured her place in the American novelistic tradition and the popular imagination.
At her death in 1937, Wharton left behind a fascinating collection of unpublished work written throughout her lifetime. This is the first scholarly edition of this body of work. Largely unfinished, these unknown works include two abandoned novels, five stage-plays, and frank life writings drafted late in her career. Several texts are works-in-progress for later, more renowned writings. The plays in particular open up a hitherto unexplored field of Wharton studies and allow scholars to adjust their assessment of her as a novelist.
Copy texts are carefully chosen. Where more than one draft exists, the most advanced version has been printed and textual variants are recorded in the endnotes. The edition also benefits from a lengthy general introduction, background essays to each genre section, headnotes and endnotes.
The edition is essential for scholars and students of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature, American Literature, Women’s Writing and the History of the Novel.
- Presents writings unpublished in Wharton’s lifetime
- Five unknown stage-plays open up a hitherto unexplored field of Wharton studies
- Publishes the abandoned novels Disintegration and Literature
- Includes frank life writings which reveal far more than Wharton’s official memoir of 1934
- Forms a practical resource beyond the Wharton archive
- New editorial material includes a general introduction, volume introductions, textual variants, headnotes and endnotes
Sample pages
Contents
Volume 1: Plays
Introduction
Editorial Note
Edith Wharton as Playwright
The Man of Genius
Untitled
The Arch
The Necklace
Kate Spain
Plays: Appendix
Volume 2: Novels and Life Writing
Introduction
Editorial Note
Fast and Loose
Disintegration
Literature
Life and I
'Quaderno dello Studente'
Bibliography
Reviews
'Of greatest interest to Rattray in compiling this masterful critical edition were the much reworked, substantial writings including a series of plays, Life-writing and extensive manuscripts of unpublished early novels ... For the first time, these writings are presented in a practical two-volume resource which is a model of scholarly dexterity and critical sensitivity.'
– Michele Gemelos, The Times Literary Supplement
' ... Rattray provides a practical resource beyond the Wharton archives; argues that the unfinished manuscripts allow one to see Wharton's creative process, a "physical process" of cutting and pasting, as more "modernist" than one might expect of a writer critical of modernism; and exposes a revealing portrait of Wharton in a first printing of her memoir, Life and I. Introductions to each section are intriguing and convincing. Recommended.'
– J Kress Karn, CHOICE
Related titles
- Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country : A Reassessment
- Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part IV : Henry James, Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde by their Contemporaries