Editor's Note

This issue of the Edith Wharton Review begins with a remembrance of George Ramsden by Susan Wissler, executive director of The Mount, and Nynke Dorhout, The Mount's librarian. George Ramsden was, as Wissler and Dorhout write, "the driving force behind the reconstruction of Edith Wharton's 2700-volume library," which has been housed at The Mount, Edith Wharton's former home, since 2006. Since then, the library has become a key resource for students and Wharton scholars. Its significance has increased in recent years as those working on The Complete Works of Edith Wharton use the library to resolve questions about Wharton's revisions to her fiction and consider the impact of her multidisciplinary reading on her work. Those who study Wharton have reason to honor Ramsden and his dedication to his work, which includes Edith Wharton's Library: A Catalogue (1999).

The three articles in this issue rely on diverse critical approaches and deal with distinct periods of Wharton's career. H. J. E. Champion's "'Hold me, Gerty, hold me': Lily Bart's Queer Desire," is the winner of the 2019 Edith Wharton Society Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar. Champion expands on Katherine Joslin's 2007 essay "Is Lily Gay?" to consider "Edith Wharton's own contradictory attitudes toward queer sexuality, situating the text within historical notions of queerness from the turn of the century." The article's questioning of "Lily's failure to cooperate with fixed notions of futurity," which The House of Mirth frames as marriage, concludes that Lily's resistance to heteronormative matrimony places her in a "state of queered flux." Next, Frederick Wegener's "What the Stones Might Not Tell: Questioning the Attribution of Edith Wharton's Print Debut" reexamines the documentary evidence relied on by scholars over the last twenty-five years to attribute to Wharton a translation of Heinrich Karl Brugsch's "Was die Steine Erzählen" ("What the Stones Tell"). Long understood to be Wharton's first publication, Wegener recounts that when the sixteen-year-old Edith Newbold Jones sought to begin a career as a professional writer, her friend Emelyn Washburn, daughter of Reverend Dr. E. A. Washburn, rector of the church Wharton's parents attended, advised her to try a translation. Wegener locates, for the first time, the translation itself, and he identifies and describes the journal in which it was published, asserting that "Heinrich Karl Brugsch was not a poet, 'Was sich die Steine Erzählen' is not a poem, and Wharton almost certainly did not translate it." The final article is Donna Campbell's "The Frenchwoman Dépaysée: Edith Wharton and Gabrielle Landormy." Campbell examines Wharton's unpublished letters to Elizabeth Gaskell (Lily) Norton written between 1924 and 1937, focusing on Wharton's discussion of Gabrielle Landormy, whom she employed during World War I. The portrait of Landormy's "transnational wanderings" provided by the letters is itself valuable. However, Campbell argues that the correspondence provides insight into "the ways in which nationality, the transnational body, and troublesome questions of sexuality and autonomy" relate to Wharton's preference that "women conform to a national ideal." Demonstrating the importance of the unpublished correspondence, Campbell presents an innovative framework within which to study Wharton's female characters in the novels The Glimpses of the Moon, Twilight Sleep, The Gods Arrive, and Hudson River Bracketed.

For their assistance in preparing this issue, I wish to thank associate editor Sharon Kim, associate editor Myrto Drizou, book review editor Shannon Brennan, special advisory editor Dale Bauer, and the rest of the editorial board. The Edith Wharton Review welcomes articles on all aspects of Wharton, including work on her relation to other writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wharton's archive, Wharton and periodical culture, the author's social networks, and her nonfiction writing.