Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit

Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit makes the case for Wharton as a novelist of morals rather than of manners; a novelist who sought answers to profound spiritual and metaphysical questions. Focusing on Wharton’s treatment of Anglicanism, Calvinism, Transcendentalism, and Catholicism, Carol Singley analyzes the short stories and seven novels in the light of religious and philosophical developments in Wharton’s life and fiction. Singley situates Wharton in the context of turn-of-the-century science, historicism, and aestheticism, reading her religious and philosophical outlook as an evolving response to the cultural crisis of belief. She invokes the dynamics of class and gender as central to Wharton’s quest, describing how the author accepted and yet transformed both the classical and Christian traditions that she inherited. By locating Wharton in the library rather than the drawing room, Matters of Mind and Spirit gives this writer her literary and intellectual due, and offers fresh ways of interpreting her life and fiction.

• First full-length study of Wharton as a novelist of morals • Traces Wharton’s religious and philsophical development in her life and fiction (7 major novels as well as the short stories) • First study to place Wharton in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and history of classical and Christian religion and philosophy; also shows how Wharton’s position as an aristocrat shaped her search for moral meaning

Introduction; 1. Priestess; 2. Spiritual homelessness; 3. Calvinist ‘moral tortures’; 4. Fragile freedoms; 5. Platonic idealism; 6. Catholicism: fulfillment or concession; Works cited; Notes.

‘… Whartonians and Americanists will welcome this book.’ American Literature

‘The strength of Singley’s vision lies in its final refusal to categorize Wharton’s thought … Matters of Mind and Spirit marks a new trend in Wharton criticism.’ Modern Fiction Studies