Synopses & Reviews
The text has been introduced and thoroughly annotated by the editor for student readers. Backgrounds and Contexts includes selections from Edith Wharton's letters; articles from the period about etiquette, vocations for women, factory life, and Working Girls' Clubs; excerpts from the work of contemporary social thinkers including Thorstein Veblen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Olive Schreiner; and a consideration of anti-Semitism at the turn of the century by historian John Higham. Also included are Charles Dana Gibson's precautionary piece "
Marrying for Money" (including four Gibson drawings) and a tableau vivant of "
The Dying Gladiator."
Criticism reprints six central contemporary reviews of the novel and six biographical and interpretive modern essays by Millicent Bell, Louis Auchincloss, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, R. W. B. Lewis, Elaine Showalter, and Elizabeth Ammons.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Synopsis
This Norton Critical Edition of Edith Wharton's quintessential novel of the Gilded Age reprints the Scribner's magazine text of 1905, including the eight original illustrations.
About the Author
Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer and designer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is the author of The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, The Decoration of Houses, and many other books.Elizabeth Ammons is the Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature at Tufts University. She is the author of Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, Edith Wharton's Argument with America, and Brave New Worlds: How Literature Will Save the Planet. She is the editor or co-editor of many books, including Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multi-Cultural Perspective, Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Casebook, American Color Writing, 1880-1920, Short Fiction by Black Women, 1900-1920, and the Norton Critical Edition of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.