Old New York’s Twin Rediscovered

Old New York (1924), Edith Wharton’s quartet of novellas, traces the history of her childhood world, decade by decade, from the 1860s through the 1890s. Neither the collection as a whole nor its component parts has attracted much attention, except for “The Old Maid,” the best of the four stories. Details about their publication may not improve the standing of Old New York in the Wharton canon, but they do place her transitioning career in the arena of the book trade.

When D. Appleton and Company issued a second tetralogy in 1931, with the parallel title of Old New Orleans and a nearly identical design, the publisher announced, albeit retrospectively, that Old New York had provided a template for The Old City Fiction Series, intended eventually to encompass San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. In Wharton’s published correspondence with Rutger B. Jewett, Appleton’s editor-in-chief, there is no mention of The Old City Fiction Series; and she likely remained unaware of it, although ads for Old New York were splashed across the dust jacket flaps of Old New Orleans. If this twin has any claim of kinship to Wharton, however, it is as a decidedly poor relation, a sibling in appearance only.

Writing to Jewett on 23 February 1923,¹ Wharton mentioned a proposal from Paul Reynolds, editor of McCall’s Magazine, for “six articles on my recollections of New York Society, at $2,500 an article.” McCall’s had evolved from the ladies’ magazines of the 1890s, a lucrative new venue aimed at middle-class readers. The pay Reynolds offered was temptingly generous, but Wharton had reservations. Old New York was “a small affair,” she told Jewett, and she expected to exhaust its literary potential by the time she finished her stories, which were intended to capitalize on the success of The Age of Innocence (1920).

Reynolds’ inquiry was nonetheless intriguing. It resonated with an idea that had “been vaguely floating” through Wharton’s mind “for some time.” She had been jotting down remembrances for possible use in a non-fictional account of “my own early memories, from 1865 to 1885, or 1890, in which I should like to interweave the recollections of my childhood and the beginning of my literary life.” In this context, Wharton pondered some points in favor of McCall’s proposal. One was self-defensive: to preempt having her recollections “inaccurately done by some one else after my death, should it turn out that my books survive me long enough to make it worth while to write my biography.” Moreover, since the memories would concern only her immediate family and her early development as a writer, there might be “no particular reason for keeping them back.” But the project hung fire until publication in 1934 of A Backward Glance, Wharton’s disappointingly oblique memoir.

Wharton asked Jewett to keep in mind these jottings, which productively filled the interludes between writing her books. As for McCall’s, the plan was that Wharton would coyly maintain silence, while Jewett informed Reynolds on her behalf “that the New York Society articles are not at all in my line.” Besides, there was apparently a score to settle: Reynolds was suspected of having “complicated affairs for us before with regard to Glimpses of the Moon.”

Wharton’s authorial maneuvers suggest how self-consciously she was revising her career goals as it seemed she had reached her peak, at least from a strictly literary perspective. Wharton was putting a new idea in motion: to redirect her efforts toward work less imaginatively taxing than before, but also more predictably profitable. By aiming at a slightly lower target, Wharton might reap rewards commensurate with the bestseller list, which also dated from the 1890s, than with the Pulitzer Prize, which The Age of Innocence ultimately won after the judges rescinded their original selection of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. In effect, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) was a successful field test of Wharton’s strategy. It became the first in a row of popular novels that cultivated and then captured the same audience as McCall’s, one less...