Wharton and Cather

This year's scholarly work on Edith Wharton includes fresh biographical perspectives, comparative studies, and historical and archival research. Major themes are religion, gender roles, war, and the rise of modernism and technological innovation. Scholars offer compelling analyses of diverse works, including short stories and longer texts such as The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, The Reef, The Custom of the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, A Son at the Front, The Mother's Recompense, and Hudson River Bracketed. Wharton's nonfiction, including Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort; In Morocco; The Writing of Fiction; and A Backward Glance, also receives attention.

In its centennial year My Ántonia dominates the current crop of Willa Cather criticism, with two essay collections (one from France published last year), a special journal issue, and other studies devoted to that 1918 novel. Approaches to My Ántonia are varied as expected, including more than one essay apiece addressing translation, narrative, intertextuality, immigration, the pastoral, the environment, space, gender, childhood, and desire. Other contexts brought to bear include World War I, foodways, and political theory. Several studies revolve substantially around the novel's introduction, which, revised by Cather in 1926, adds multiple levels of instability to a text that remains both a popular classic and an interpretive enigma. Among other works The Professor's House, The Song of the Lark, and O Pioneers! are most examined. Cather also receives chapters in books on the subjects of progressive education, Chicago modernism, and insecurity. Melissa J. Homestead's deep dives into archives—yielding, for example, Cather's forgotten 1920 Vanity Fair essay on Danish novelist Martin Anderson Nexø—continue to nudge the borders of the field.

The Wharton section of the chapter is contributed by Mary A. Carney and the Cather section by Joseph C. Murphy.

i Edith Wharton

a. Books

Claudine Lesage's Edith Wharton in France (Westport, Conn.: Prospecta Press and the Mount Press), originally published as Edith Wharton en France (2011), appears this year revised for an American audience. Lesage died in 2013, before her English version of the manuscript was completed, and her husband and the Mount executive director Susan Wissler finalized the work and arranged for its publication. Lesage's archival sleuthing draws from the daybooks of Paul and Minnie Bourget, Wharton's correspondence with French engineer Léon Bélugou, and other resources in France to create a biographical portrait of Wharton's expatriate life from the perspective of a native French person. The book is divided into two parts, "Parisianizing" and "Countryfying," the former covering the years 1893–1918 and the latter 1918–37, with insights into her French life and friendships, the labor of the war years, the collapse of her marriage and her affair with Morton Fullerton, and the pleasures of reviving a Mediterranean villa replete with gardens. With new photographs and materials, Lesage's biography brings fresh perspective and a reminder that archival investigations continue to augment our understanding of Wharton's life.

Two book-length works, though not literary criticism, are of interest to Wharton scholars. Drawn from retirement travels and historical research, Ed and Libby Klekowski's Edith Wharton and Mary Roberts Rinehart at the Western Front, 1915 (McFarland) traces the wartime journeys and experiences of these authors in this readable comparative study that also integrates the perspectives of journalists and other eyewitnesses to animate war zone life and landscapes. In Classical Principles for Modern Design: Lessons from Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman's "The Decoration of Houses" (New York: Monacelli) designer and decorative arts historian Thomas Jayne explains the persistent value of Wharton and Codman's influential book on residential design. Jayne structures his text to parallel the chapter organization of The Decoration of Houses, interweaving their doctrines with his own design aesthetics.

b. Archival Studies

In "Edith Wharton's Bible" (Edith Wharton Review [EWhR] 34, i: 62–78) Sally A. R. Jones gives an exhaustive review of marks and marginalia in Wharton's copy of the Bible and delineates Wharton's particular interest in passages about wisdom. Jones's essay is a valuable resource, especially for those...