“Justice” to Edith Wharton’s A Backward Glance

Edith Wharton’s autobiography, A Backward Glance, has long frustrated readers. Loring Schuler, her editor at Ladies’ Home Journal, made no secret of his disappointment with her intellectual tone and focus on forgotten people. While no single document can capture a subject as complex as Wharton, A Backward Glance comes closest by presenting the “self” as an expression of “consciousness.” The book becomes a different book when not read solely for its content, but for the ways in which it continues, defies, and revisions the genre of autobiography.