On "The Legend" by Edith Wharton (10,468 words) ****

So some author writes some cool stuff, but no one notices or cares. That's probably the tale of most writers, though most probably aren't that good, which helps explain why no one care, but sometimes there are good authors who aren't good at catching the market. This happens. This happens to Pellerin. So he leaves, drops out of society, disappears. Meanwhile, in his absence, his books catch on. Folks forge reading groups around him. Scholars write about his work. A whole philosophy of life gets based around what he has to say. And then one day, he returns, not as Pellerin but as someone else. He's heard rumors, wants to know what people think of his work. He goes to the reading groups, meets with his fans and scholars, none of whom know who he is. He even writes another book. What do you think happens? Read the story here.

On "The Lady's Maid Bell" by Edith Wharton (8729 words) ****

So much for going to the country for rest. A woman recovering from typhoid goes to work as a maid at a quiet estate, but one of the people she meets her first day is not alive. Why doesn't the staff use the bell system that has been integrated throughout the house? We soon find out. The ghost leads us down many paths, though I'm not sure that the story provides many answers by its end, but I think that's what makes this story so mystifying. Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "Expiation" by Edith Wharton (8246 words) ***

This story is somewhat predictable, but the question at its heart is one worth pondering. The focus is on writers and on how they can get their writing to be more popularly successful. The way? Make it controversial. If you can get someone to ban it, you're sure of success. When a writer's attempt to write something in that vein, however, it is given a good review and noted as being quite pleasant, much to the author's chagrin. The story revolves around her attempt to "fix" the book's reception. Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "The Descent of Man" by Edith Wharton (7317 words) ****

What if you wrote something you knew was atrocious but that you also knew most people would take seriously (and love)? Would you sell it? Such is the quandary in this tale about a scientist that publishes something that goes against most of his values--its meant as a satire but is not taken as such. That's fine, he thinks, because those who would understand the satire would still understand it. But he finds the attention to his work not easily voided. Read the story here.

On "The Rembrandt" by Edith Wharton (5986 words) ****

What makes for great art? That is the question in yet another Wharton story on the same theme. Here, a woman claims to own a Rembrandt that is unsigned. As such, no museum will buy it, though she needs the money. Is it the signature alone that makes us declare a work great? Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "The Recovery" by Edith Wharton (6978 words) ****

What makes for great art? That is the question that Wharton asks in this piece in which a painter benefits from a visit to a museum, where he realizes that his own work can be much improved--and where he also realizes that what he has been producing is not art in the form that is worthy, even if others like it. Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "A Cup of Cold Water" by Edith Wharton (10,262 words) ****

Woburn loves a woman with expensive tastes. What this means is his spent out his savings, his year's salary, and has "borrowed" generously from his employer. The end is near. Men can be pretty dumb when it comes to ladies. Tomorrow, there's an inspection at the job; Woburn will be found out. The story focuses on his last night, his plans to run to some other place, and the sorrow of losing the gal for whom he's gotten himself in so much trouble. At some point in the story, as he's staying in a hotel room instead of the boat he's to flee on, having locked himself out of his apartment, he hears woman crying and . . . a click, of a gun. It's this last item that the story revolves around and, alas, the least believable. Were it not for this one plot point, the story would be quite an achievement. Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "Souls Belated" by Edith Wharton (10,669 words) ****

Much has changed about divorce and relationships since Wharton wrote this story, and yet in some ways, not really. The woman in this story has run off with another man, and her husband has thus, unsurprisingly, filed for divorce. Scandal shall ensue. But really, will it? The couple have no desire to live according to societal standards, which they feel are inauthentic and lend themselves to fighting against what real love is all about--you don't need paper and laws for love. But they also feel the pull toward such, toward marriage. After the initial scandal, if they marry, after a few years, they'll be like any other couple and will be accepted back into mainstream high society (the first marriage forgotten). In the sense that divorce still brings with it a certain scandal and that marriage to another, after a time, essentially erases earlier history, these ideas seem as applicable today as one hundred years ago. The difference now would be in the scandal of not marrying--something that is fairly common now. While I can see the point, as raised in the story, that laws and pieces of paper and taboos are in a sense not true emblems of love, especially if we conform to them only to fit in; at the same time, the laws and pieces of paper, I would contend, do much to shelter and confirm that love. I can't help but think how uncertain one might feel if a "spouse" could run off at any moment without any consequences; the law makes such a break more difficult and lends to furthering one's commitment, which, in the end, is actually showing more love. Read the story here.

On "The Letters" by Edith Wharton (14,438 words) *****

This story is many things and one that seems, at first, particularly timely in a nation focused on the #MeToo movement. It's a tale of a man taking advantage of a naive young woman. Or at least, that's what it seems at the beginning, when Mr. Dearing first takes a pass at his nanny, an older single gal whose life has not turned out so well. Disadvantaged, with few good marriage prospects, she's falls hard for the married man. And then . . . the story takes a strange turn. Mr. Dearing's wife dies. The two might actually be able to settle down together. Does the man really want her, however? It seems so--and then, maybe not, and then maybe so, and then maybe not. The middle portion of this long piece reads like many a real-life romance, the way we never know someone's heart or true motives. But in the end, the story becomes something other than that, something about the will, about how sometimes truth is less important than willing one's self into happiness. Read the story here.

On "Afterward" by Edith Wharton (5322 words) *****

This ghost tale focuses on a ghost one doesn't know exists until "afterward," and as such it's rather chilling. A couple buys a haunted house in which nothing seems wrong. But the woman keeps having premonitions about something being odd or strange. That said, nothing is. Until . . . it's too late. Afterward. Read the story here.

On "Full Circle" by Edith Wharton (8349 words) *****

Betton is an author who finds fan mail tiresome, so he hires a man named Vyse to respond to the mail for him. Vyse is a former classmate--and also an author himself, an unsuccessful author who once asked Betton for help getting his novel published, a novel that Betton found riveting, much better than anything he could write himself. Betton, however, did not help--let other matters get in the way. Now, with Vyse as his needy and poor assistant, Betton feels guilty--but also uncertain of Vyse's motives. Does Vyse recognize that Betton is not as good a writer? Does he realize that this second novel is not as good as the first? How can Betton keep up his reputation for Vyse or keep needy Vyse in his employee? In one sense, this is a story of revenge--but of revenge that a person perpetrates on himself for a life badly lived. Read the story here.

On "The Last Asset" by Edith Wharton (12,119 words) *****

A journalist befriends an American woman who is at the center of the social world from which he draws his stories. She in turn wants a favor--she wants him to get in touch with her husband, from whom she has been separated for years. The husband is needed for the daughter's wedding, or else no wedding can take place. Why the husband is separated, how he lives, and why he has no interest in helping is at the center of this story, a center which comes to encompass even the journalist. The story is told in the third-person limited perspective of the journalist, and yet, it's one of those tales that fits in with The Great Gatsby or On the Road insofar as the story isn't really about the main character but about someone whom the main character is obsessed with (although actually, this story is about the main character insofar as he is the one transformed in it, even if he's not the main spring for the events). Those two novels are first person, and I wonder to some degree why, given that the story is still told from a limited perspective, why Wharton didn't settle on first person for this one. Read the story here.

On "The House of the Dead Hand" by Edith Wharton (10,201 words) *****

Wharton had a knack for mysteries. This one reads like a gothic tale ala Poe and Borges. A man is asked to get a copy of a newly discovered painting by Leonardo, which has been purchased for a private collection. The purchaser, however, is a man who will not allow others to photograph the image and, save for the young visitor (who has some special connections), even look or describe the painting, which was purchased by the daughter of the current owner. The painting, however, is also the daughter's prison sentence, for the father is not just possessive of it but insanely attached to it such that no one else in the family can live a normal life. Read the story here at the Atlantic.

On "The Reckoning" by Edith Wharton (8233 words) *****

This story looks at the emotional toll that divorce takes on a person, most especially the person not expecting/wanting the divorce. Unattached love is all fine and glorious if you're the one who gets out first. The story renders a bit too little of the pain that is usually experienced on the part of the party ending the relationship, but it does so to make a point about how love cannot be all about one's own self and feelings at a given time. Read the story here.

On "The Touchstone" by Edith Wharton (26,849 words) *****

Essentially a novella, this work ruminates on the subject of loyalty, love, and literary acumen. A man befriends a woman writer whose husband soon dies; she falls for him, writes to him for years, but the love is unrequited. Years later, after her death and needing money to be able to marry, the man arranges for the publication of the letters, which are a huge literary hit, but at what price to his personal soul? What do we owe to the dead? Do we keep their secrets forever? Read the story here at Project Gutenberg.

On "The Pelican" by Edith Wharton (7614 words) *****

There's something about stories that are written in the first person about someone else that I seem drawn to. I think of The Great Gatsby, On the Road, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The latter seems less like the first two insofar as things actually seem to happen around Owen that affect the narrator; by contrast, the narrator in the first two pieces isn't really a large part of the story. He's a hanger-on, a person fascinated by the characters around him--and most especially one. (Brideshead Revisited has a similar dynamic, I'm now realizing.) Perhaps it's the narrator's fascination that works its magic on me: I too become interested in knowing more about this acquaintance or friend, as mystified as the narrator is. "The Pelican" works a similar form. Here, the narrator is a man who happens to fall in with a woman whose husband has died and who has a young child. She takes to the lecture circuit to make money. Unlike those other stories, however, here perhaps it is the narrator himself who is rather fascinating--this because he seems so much to detest the woman but still spends so much time writing about her, dropping in on her lectures, trying to avoid her, and so on. In short, he finds her lectures facile. But years go by, and every five to ten years he ends up running into her, each time, she's still at it, raising money to educate her son. At some of these drop-ins, she's wildly successful; at others, she's down on her luck. Such is fortune. But that son, well, she's been doing this a long while--and we begin to realize something more about the woman, that she's a con of sorts. And we begin to wonder also what exactly it is that draws her to lecturing, what makes her tick. Read the story here.

On "Mrs. Manstey's View" by Edith Wharton (4114 words) ***

What makes this fairly formulaic story so special isn't the plot, which is as drear as one would expect from Edith Wharton, or the characters, who are perhaps a bit less uniquely drawn than usual but the writing style, which is beautiful and the portrait of loneliness in its most egregious form and what little hope one clings to. Manstey is an old lady with nothing to live for but a room with a view. Read the story here.

On "Collected Stories, 1891-1910" by Edith Wharton ****

This collection of writings from the first half of Wharton's writing life runs the gambit of subject matter.

"The Fulness of Life" works off of some fairly banal tropes: A woman at the gates of heaven finds the love she's always wanted, except it means that her husband will have to be alone for eternity because she was his love for all time. Guess what happens?

In "The Lamp of Psyche" a woman in love with her husband discovers that, though able bodied, he did not fight in the Civil War. Why? Her idealistic bubble is burst.

"The Valley of Childish Things" is a series of short vignettes that read almost like jokes. It's a strange piece that I'm not sure adds up to much--but that leave one with lots to ponder.

"The Muse's Tragedy" is about a literary critic who finds the companion of a dead writer he's written extensively about. The companion and he forge a relationship, but as the story proceeds, we move from third person to first and learn the truth of the companion's relationship to the dead writer, which is not, at least as she perceives it, the way that others have perceived it.

"A Journey" is a melodramatic tale about a woman who has to bring her sick, dying husband home but who seems unwilling to let anyone else know he's dead once he kicks the bucket. The piece seemed overwritten to me, like something I'd expect to see in some slick magazine for people looking for "thrilling" writing.

"The Pelican," by contrast, is one of the best Wharton stories I've read. It's a tale about a man's various meetings with a woman over the years, but it's tone is such that it gripped me from start to finish.

"Soul Belated," about divorce and non-remarriage, feels both quite modern and a bit dated, insofar as society standards go. Wharton is a curious figure insofar as her writings about relationships go--her modern sensibility fits in well today, but she was writing in and for a time when views were quite different.

"The Twilight of the God" is a short play and seems out of sort with the stories in the collection. It focuses on the ways in which we idealize relationships of the past to the detriment of those in the present.

"A Cup of Cold Water" is another study in class, which so many of the Wharton stories deal in. Here, as with many of her protagonists, a man has gotten in over his head, taking out a gal whose tastes are far too expensive for his salary, and pays the price.

"The Touchstone" is a novella that touches a bit on class (a man needs money to marry) but even more so it deals with questions of what we owe to the dead and to those who love us, even if we don't love back.

"The Duchess at Prayer" and "The Angel at the Grave" both in their own ways deal with the way that one responds to death and to the legacies that people leave behind, the first a statue of a woman at prayer and the second a man's storied ideas.

Fine art figured large in many works by Edith Wharton, as in "The Recovery," which revolves around a woman who marries a painter whose reputation is such that he is hired to paint for various patrons and even to have a show in Europe. In "The Rembrandt" a woman attempts to sell an "unsigned" Rembrandt--something no museum would be interested in precisely because it lacks the signature. "The Moving Finger" combines with art the macabre, when a man who loses his wife asks that a painting of her be continuously updated so that she ages with him. "Sanctuary" focuses on an architect who is faced with an ethical dilemma.

"The Descent of Man" focuses on the difference between economic considerations and values/science in answer to the question regarding the prostitution of one's writing versus true art.

"The Mission of Jane" is a tale about adoption told from the point of view of the ambivalent (even negative) adoptive father. The story ends with the father finding love within him, as one would expect, but not in the same place where one would usually expect.

"The Other Two" is a fine tale ahead of its time, focusing on a newly married man and his relationship with his divorced wife's two previous husbands. "The Reckoning" continues on that theme, with a woman coming to terms with what it really means to divorce someone after her second marriage ends.

"Expiation" is another piece focusing on writers--this time, on the nature of what makes a particular work popular.

"The Lady's Maid Bell" is a well-put-together ghost story with a ghost that is perhaps a bit more interactive than in most such stories I've read. "The House of the Dead Hand" is another ghost story, but only in its final moments--before then, it is a gothic tale around which the mystery of of a masterpiece makes the piece one that one can't stop reading.

"The Introducers" is a forgettable romance story whose plot is predictable from early on. "The Hermit and the Wild Woman" is another less intriguing story, this one reading like a Catholic fairy tale.

The very fine "The Last Asset" is a kind of psychological horror story, insofar as the main character learns how manipulated he has been when helping a lady with her daughter's wedding. "The Pretext" also works off the idea of love used as an excuse to perform certain actions that are not as genuine as one desires; here, an older, married woman falls for a younger man who also falls for her and who drops a fiance because he can't handle marrying someone else, much to family consternation. Does he love her, or is something else going on?

"The Pot Boiler" returns to the theme of art versus money. Here, an artist is convinced to paint portraits of society ladies for good cash, hence, compromising his artistic vision. Wharton seems to suggest that it's okay for folks without real talent to paint (etc.) for money but that it's a waste for a person with talent, who should live in poverty for art until discovered. I used to have conversations with a roommate on this subject, who viewed folks who wrote pop lit as hopelessly compromised. I wasn't totally convinced then that such a person was sacrificing integrity then, and I'm even less convinced now. After all, why should one's artistic skills only be put to use for the highest ends and not for the everyday? You can do "low-end" stuff and use it to pay for the high end, if that's what you want to do.

"The Best Man" focuses on a similar issue of money versus integrity, this time in politics. A governor has a district attorney few like, a man who had had a scandal a few years before and who the governor hired anyway, at his wife's urging. Now, it has come to light that his wife was paid to urge the governor to hire the man, just as she has again been requested now by another party to help get him fired. The news is about to break. What is the governor to do? Sully his (or rather his wife's) reputation by not firing the D.A. or fire him to avoid the scandal? Or?

"His Father's Son" is about a man living his life through his son, who is doing things he dreamed of doing (moving to the big city and becoming a society man).

In "The Daunt Diana" a man collects artwork, sells it, and re-collects it. "The Debt" focuses on a scientist's assistant who upends all that the scientist has done once he's dead, much to the consternation of the scientist's relatives. What is loyalty? To be true to scientific ends or to be true to someone's legacy? Or is the legacy those scientific ends?

"Full Circle" is a deft exploration of the psychology of guilt, as an author hires another author to write fan letters for him.

"The Legend" is about the cult of authorship, how we often esteem highly what others esteem more than we esteem by any sort of objective criteria (if that's even possible).

"The Eyes" and "Afterward" return to the ghost tale. In the former, a man describes a pair of eyes that look at him at night, mostly when he has run-ins with one family. "Afterward" is about a ghost one doesn't know is a ghost until "afterward."

The long "The Letters" closes the collection, focusing on many of Wharton's themes about love but reminiscent in some ways of the 1944 best-seller Forever Amber in its caustic views.

Wharton stands as a writer at the end of one era and the start of another. Her language is sometimes verbose, but her sensibilities are quite modern. In this sense, I find her fiction a joy to read. 

On "The Other Two" by Edith Wharton (7477 words) *****

Wharton's turns her attention to the life of a man who has married a twice-divorced woman. His discomfort, as it becomes clear during the early days of the marriage, with her previous husbands is hard to read about. Like most things we are handed in life, the husband learns simply to accept what has come before him--and even that these men are much better men than his wife ever let on. I have friends who are still friends with their ex-wives, who are even friends with their ex-wives' new husbands. Perhaps, our culture is slightly different now, the way that people so often remarry or even go from one boy/girlfriend to another, often dating someone a friend and acquaintance once slept with. Still, as a guy, I find myself more in tune with the man's discomfort in this story than with the seeming ease that various people I know seem to carry themselves in such situations. I suppose we all do have a tendency to make things look easy from the outside. Read Wharton's story here.

On "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton *****

In line with William Dean Howells's account of Silas Lapham, Wharton's story tells of a young lady who is ruined by doing right. There is a slight difference, however. Lapham seemed a man of mostly indubitable strength of character with occasional lapses; Lily Bart, of The House of Mirth, is a woman of seemingly weak character who transcends herself through the efforts of a friend and through the ties of love.

Lily Bart has been reared to prize money and to live with and among those who have it. Denied her rightful prize, she has something to trade to obtain what she deserves: good looks. From the start of the book to its end, she sets out to marry a rich man who will make her life as full as it has been promised to be. But in that process, she discovers--sort of--that happiness doesn't consist in the riches one has but in the kind of person one is. I say "sort of" because she seems conflicted about this right up until the very last few pages. Were the story to continue, to be able to continue, one wonders whether Bart would renounce her ideas of happiness in feeling and return to happiness in riches. She seems very closed in by her upbringing and the values that she was reared with.

But I guess that's sort of the point. At one place in the novel, Lily Bart discovers that, raised to be rich, she really has no value as anything but a showpiece. At first, she detests work; later, she comes to see that she can't even do it.

Who Wharton wrote this book for is something I've been wondering. Certainly, the same forces of fate work on Bart to create its miserable end as one might find in many a novel of the period. But Wharton's bitter swipes at the immorality of the upper class would wipe away any sympathy among that set. This leaves the lower classes--or more likely the middle classes, able to have some time to read--as the audience, those able to be swayed by the author's argument that money ain't everything. But isn't it? If money doesn't bring happiness to Lily Bart, it certainly makes life more tolerable, and its lack draws her demise. Sure, she can take a certain comfort in family life, but I'm tempted to see this as a seemingly easy answer meant to squash down the rabble rousers wishing to move forcefully into the higher echelons of American society. Be content, Wharton says. But why?

Or why not? Is not America in part about striving toward being better off? Does not that itself make the American dream a bit of an delusion.

Download the book to read for yourself here or to listen to it here.