The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton

The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton offers a series of fresh examinations of Edith Wharton’s fiction written both to meet the interest of the student or general reader who encounters this major American writer for the first time and to be valuable to advanced scholars looking for new insights into her creative achievement. The essays cover Wharton’s most important novels as well as some of her shorter fiction, and utilise both traditional and innovative critical techniques, applying the perspectives of literary history, feminist theory, psychology or biography, sociology or anthropology, or social history. The Introduction supplies a valuable review of the history of Wharton criticism which shows how her writing has provoked varying responses from its first publication, and how current interests have emerged from earlier ones. A detailed chronology of Wharton’s life and publications and a useful bibliography are also provided.

• Big name critics (Ammons, Bell, Showalter, Tuttleton, Vance) plus exciting new ones (Bentley, Knights, Skillern, Howard [also a novelist]) • Includes a recently rediscovered critical essay on Wharton’s first long work, The Valley of Decision, by a contemporary, Vernon Lee • Useful introduction by Bell with a history of Wharton criticism over the years, not to be found elsewhere

Chronology of Wharton’s life; Introduction: a critical history Millicent Bell; 1. The social subject in The Age of Innocence Pamela Knights; 2. Edith Wharton and the science of manners Nancy Bentley; 3. Edith Wharton and race Elizabeth Ammons; 4. The Custom of the Country: Spragg and the art of the deal Elaine Showalter; 5. The female conscience in Wharton’s shorter fiction Gloria C. Erlich; 6. Law language and ritual in Summer Rhonda Skillern; 7. The House of Mirth: the bachelor and the baby Maureen Howard; 8. The Fruit of the Tree: Justine and the perils of abstract idealism James W. Tuttleton; 9. The Valley of Decision: Edith Wharton’s Italian mask William L. Vance; 10. Edith Wharton’s Valley of Decision: a rediscovered contemporary critique Vernon Lee; Bibliography; Index.