Editor's Note

This issue of the Edith Wharton Review features four articles that analyze canonical novels by Wharton through the framework of adaptation studies, the role of intertextuality in the author's depiction of the psychodynamics between two of her best-known characters, Wharton's artistic engagement with the fiction of women regionalist writers of the Northeast and Appalachian South, and the influence on Lawrence Selden of forensic crime-scene analysis in the final scene of The House of Mirth. These readings indicate the value of atypical archival sources to Wharton studies, as well as the need to be alert to her engagement with contemporary drama and works of regional fiction, while the fourth article demonstrates Wharton's capacity to imbue her characters with perspectives shaped by ideologies not only of class and race, but of science.

In the first article, Bethany Wood expands the scope of archival sources and methodologies relevant to Wharton scholarship in her article on Philip Moeller's 1934 RKO film adaptation of The Age of Innocence, asserting the need to rethink what adaptation studies has concluded about the process by which this film version was created. Wood argues that "traditional subjects and cultural hierarchies" shaping the field of adaptation studies, along with Wharton's own "disregard for film … and downplaying of theater," have created gaps in our understanding of efforts to bring the novel to the screen in the 1920s and 1930s. Wood draws on the RKO Radio Pictures Studio Records at UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library to discuss the process of adapting the film for the 1934 version, which, she demonstrates, was focused on making a story set in the 1870s accessible to modern audiences.

Lucas McCarthy considers a scene few have studied to analyze Wharton's use of intertextuality to communicate the dynamics of the romantic liaison between Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence. McCarthy discusses an "intertextual dialogue" between the ribbon-kissing scene in Dion Boucicault's script and stage performance of The Shaughraun (1874) and the novel. He argues that the performance of Boucicault's play attended by the couple provides a model for their relationship, which they enact repeatedly after seeing the play. The article offers a new reading of the final scene in Paris as a "shared performance" by Newland and Ellen linked to The Shaughraun.

Martha Billips examines the relation of Summer to fiction by a network of regionalists who published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her discussion of "stories of encounter" within the tradition of regional fiction apposes Wharton's novel with Mary Noailles Murfree's "The Star in the Valley" (1878) and Sarah Orne Jewett's "The White Heron" (1886). Billips compares the portrayals of an encounter between an urban, male visitor and a local rural girl present in all three narratives, and in doing so demonstrates that Wharton, who disparaged Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, nevertheless took up subjects and published in venues shared by regionalist writers.

In the final piece, Mary Marchand examines the invention of the forensic "scene" by a new science, which "revealed that objects contain records of past activities." Her article considers the final chapter of The House of Mirth, where, Marchand argues, Selden's examination of the objects in Lily's room suggest that the "literary influence of forensic science was felt far beyond the genre of detective fiction." Her consideration of the "testimony of objects" in the final scene of The House of Mirth as signifying a "forensic imagination" that shapes Selden's attitude and actions as he examines Lily Bart's room the morning after her death is a strikingly original reading.

I wish to extend my heartfelt thanks to my Edith Wharton Review colleagues Sharon Kim, Myrto Drizou, and Shannon Brennan, as well as the members of the editorial board, whose expertise and commitment to scholarship on Wharton and her circle has made my work on this issue, my first as editor, so rewarding. I am also indebted to the staff at Penn State University Press, who have supported tirelessly the new editorial team and patiently answered our many questions. I wish to express my...