Very good

The typical Wharton topics are on display: divorce, society stuffiness, nouveaux riches, very very old rich families, the continent—Paris, London, Florence—and New York. In the shorter format, however, the typical Whartonian achiness is stifled. Here we have only a glimpse of the character rather than their entire depressing evolution, like Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence or Lily Bart in The House of Mirth.

The two stand-outs are Autres Temps, a ruminative tale of an old woman jettisoned by society after her divorce who realizes the mores have changed but she still finds herself outcast, and Souls Belated, a story of yet another New York divorcée trying to find liberation for herself in an unconventional relationship in Europe who finds herself pulled back into her constrained former life. They are unhappy narratives no doubt inspired by Wharton's own yearning and pushing against the world she was born into. While accomplished, they merely whetted my appetite for longer-form Wharton.

Wish it wasn't over. Some favourite passages:

"With grim irony Waythorn compared himself to a member of a syndicate. He held so many shares in his wife's personality and his predecessors were his partners in the business. ... He even began to reckon up the advantages which accrued from it, to ask himself if it were not better to own a third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who had lacked the opportunity to acquire the art."

"He himself, for instance - the most insignificant of her acquisitions - was beginning to feel like a squeezed sponge at the mere thought of her; and it was this sense of exhaustion, of the inability to provide more, either materially or morally, which had provoked his exclamation on opening her note."

"Then the next time I get a 'Mrs. Jaspar requests the pleasure' I'll answer it with a 'Mr. Warley declines the boredom.' "

"There was a pause during which Leila, vaguely averting herself from her mother's scrutiny, drifted towards the dressing-table and began to disturb the symmetry of the brushes and bottles laid out on it."

Edith Wharton: F. Scott Fitzgerald before he could even pick up a pen. This is the book that introduced me to her, and you couldn't ask for a wittier, more beatifully written initiation into the delicate, insightful, evocative work of Edith Wharton.

Her short stories are just as delicious as her novels. The title story is especially good.

Oh I really savored this novel.

I think Edith Wharton might be allergic to happiness but that’s okay. Really really into the stories souled belated, the angel at the grave, and auters temps. Really funny and really tragic most of the stories. Kinda one of the best American writers ever probs.

I am indebted to Otto Scott and Rush for their frequent commentary on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists—which happen to be regular characters throughout this work in symbol and often by name. It is hardly a surprise that the misandrous and postmodern sexual identity issues discussed here are the consequences of their compromised, quasi-unitarian influence.

Though I taught Flannery O’Connor stories as the best ever written, Wharton’s title story here competes, with the greatest ending ever. (Must avoid spoiler.) Roman fever was the warning of grandparents— probably malaria back then. The next generation warned kids not to go out for romantic entanglements. For Mrs Ansley in this story, prone to illness, she was warned not to go out after 4 PM, especially not to go out at night to the Coliseum where, though locked, lovers found admittance with bribes. Before her marriage, Mrs. A had been invited to that architectural ruin by the boyfriend, later to be the successful Wall Street lawyer, of the other woman here, who became Slade’s wife: but Mrs. Slade in fact had written the invite, assumed she had fooled the smaller woman, who was more beautiful in youth.
Here EW elucidates the secret envy of old friends. Each feels, “she was rather sorry for her”(9). Wharton writes gems, like,
“Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver”(10).

“It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in mid-heaven”(13)
and, “The clear heaven overhead was emptied of its gold. Dusk spread over it..”(18)

All Wharton’s stories display her European upbringing, even touring a French border town during WWI (See my review of her travel book). The cover on my 1993 edition features a Parisian painting, (woman with “Cigarette” by Lebasque, Musée d’Orsay). Every story features society women in various competitive encounters, and of course Wharton’s house in the Berkshires, The Mount, gives expression to her status, including literary (she rode, conversed with Henry James in his early motorcar). Wharton and James are truly international, while Hemingway, writing in Italy and Paris, comes to us as quintessentially American.

More hilarious than the great first story, the second, Xingu, exposes society women who restrict their Lunch Club to six. They assign books to read—avoiding the amusing (thus, the great). The latest admitee to the group, Mrs Roby, doesn’t read the work assigned, by the famous author who’s visiting. Yet she manages to confound that author, and indeed the whole group of six. Mrs. Leveret carries a pocket “Appropriate Allusions,” and can quote several until the group meets, when she can only recall one, from the Book of Job, which she has failed to find occasion for, though Melville did, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?”(30) Adding to the satire, EW here compares social conversation to war, “Miss Van Vluyck resolved to carry the war into the enemy’s camp”(35).

“The Last Asset,” later in the collection, focuses on an older man who’s lived in Paris forever, despite shabby clothes, and typically American, knows no French, asks for the bill, “Gassong! L’addition, silver play” Garçon, l’addition, si vous plais (155). He is small and bald, eats at a low-cost place (rather like where we ate near Chariot d’Or decades ago, croque messieurs and a vin deux franc). Keeping obscure, he reads one local paper for examples of human folly, rather as I read the Venice’s Il Gazzetino, now online, but years ago newsprint, when living on the Lido, researching my books on Giordano Bruno. Garnett, his compadre at the low-cost place, knows a Mrs. Newell from NYC, who overspends and depends on her aristocratic acquaintances to put her up in the UK and France. Suddenly she needs her daughter’s dislocated father, since her daughter Hermy, Hermione, has landed a great French catch, an aristocrat no less. But the French require both parents at the marriage. Will the small, penniless father show up?

The next story, “After Holbein,” shall end my review. Mrs. Jaspar, scion of society decades ago, features here with nurse and maid Lavinia. She uses the names of her early servants for her current ones, though they have changed. She insists on bringing out her expensive jewels from her safe—to which only the Butler knows the combination—in order to entertain dozens at her grand table, dozens who no longer arrive. Nor are the invitations she composed sent. The table is no longer set with gold plate, though the famous chandelier still hangs.
Mrs. Jaspar criticizes her current servants,
“‘Lavinia! My fan, my gloves, my handkerchief…how often do I have to tell you?
I used to have the perfect maid—-‘
Lavinia’s eyes brimmed, ‘That was me, madam.’”
Of this scene, the nurse Cress told her friends, “To watch the two of them is better than any circus”(214).

But the story begins with the most prominent of her guests, Anson Warley, small and witty years ago, so much invited that he gave up her grand parties “declining the boredom” as he told friends, hoping she would not hear. At any rate, Mr Warley accepts an invitation, finally, and is received for a dinner of mashed potato and spinach with wine, though not the vintages declared, and the food served on mere kitchen plates. I should note, though not specific to this story, that Wharton’s favorite adjective may be “petrified.”

I love wonderful short stories!!!!

Wharton's stories are quite varied. They range in tone from satiric to tragic and her subjects range from gilded age social dynamics, to family drama, to l'amour. Yet they're all full of keen psychological insights which (and this is what makes her a master) take into account the effects of social restrictions and expectations on characters' thought processes.

It’s very hard to rate a short story collection, but I loved every single one so this seemed appropriate.