Woo hoo! Roman Fever is a saucy, saucy story

I like all the knitting

who knew knitting could be so passionate?


...


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/fema...

One would think that performance artist/craftivist Casey Jenkins'
vaginal knitting project
would be the most passionate instance of knitting there is.

But one would be WRONG WRONG WRONG

The goings-on around Casey Jenkins' vulva are as
milquetoast as they come

but Roman Fever?

"Mrs. Ansley's hands lay inert across her needles. She looked straight out at the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor at her feet."

her knitting is more crimson from the get go
than Casey Jenkins' ever was.

Yet to experience a miss from Edith. All the typical satire, beautiful prose, and compelling interactions between characters that I've come to expect, but my first time reading one of her short story collections. Lovely collection of tales!

Wharton is so good at what she does, and although much of her work revolves around similar characters in a similar setting I never get tired of it and she always something new to say.

"Roman Fever" is the best - clever and unexpected.

I love Edith Wharton and this collection of short stories is the first of her short stories I have read. It is interesting to try to read them in the context of the time in which she wrote them; it reveals how courageous and radical she was as a writer and as a woman. A great collection.

The lead into the story sets an uneasy tone of distance between the two women. The author begins the story by showing us the two mothers sitting on a terrace of a roman restaurant. The distance is well represented in the text by the careful word choice, for example, in the lead the women “looked first at each other, and then down on the out spread glories of Palatine and the Form.” This looking at each other then looking out at the scene before them is the sort of thing that strangers or acquaintances would do. As the reader gets more into the story, the author again sets the distance between the two women, “perhaps we didn’t know much more about each other.” When Mrs. Ansley says this to Mrs. Slade, it conveys to the reader that Mrs. Ansley is hiding something from her companion. Again, the author shows us space between the two, “for a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected on how little they knew each other.”


As the two women reflect, they both stereotype each other into neat little molds in their heads without ever scratching below the surface. Their friendship exists only on a superficial level. Mrs. Slade as described by Mrs. Ansley was beautiful and vibrant, full of life and excitement in her past; but in her present she is depressed and “full of failures and mistakes.” Mrs. Ansley by Mrs. Slades description is beautiful yet dull, in past and present, “Museum specimens of old New York.” Mrs. Slade spends a lot of time contemplating her past and present relations with Mrs. Ansley. She also spends a lot of time being jealous of Mrs. Ansley’s daughter because she is more exciting then her own daughter. We learn that the two women after getting married around the same time also lived in New York across the street from one another. The two women’s husbands also died around the same time. These superficial similarities seem to be all that their friendship is based upon: “The similarity of their lot had again drawn them together.” They had no real conversation flow between them, as you expect old friends to have. There are no specific memories of anything that the two of them did together in the past or present of the entire text. Another good example of how little they knew of each other: “So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope.” When you look through the wrong end of a telescope you see very little of the big picture.


The author’s focus is on the tone of uneasiness, which finally makes its full-blown entrance as the two women sit in silence on the terrace. Mrs. Slade, the longer she sits, seems to become more and more jealous of her companion. “She thought:” I must make one more effort not to hate her.” Yet in her attempt not to hate her, she cannot help but to hate Mrs. Ansley. She learns that Mrs. Ansley not only was in love with Delphin, but that she slept with him and had his child, Barbara. This proves to be the reason why Mrs. Ansley’s mother rushed her off to Florence to get married quickly to Horace only two months after her affair with Delphin.


The ending was not what I had readily expected, but the tone had been set for it from the lead into the story. This explains the uneasy feelings between the two women and the superficial friendship.

BOOK REVIEW ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The problem with collecting and reading one author’s work over the years is assuming a new volume is all new. Not so here. I enjoyed rereading these, but there was nothing new to me. Some of these stories pack a punch. If you’ve not read Wharton’s short stories, this is a good place to start.
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2022 Reviewed

Roman Fever by Edith Wharton
Splendid story

This is an excellent and very poignant short story, by a great author that I had had the chance to read before.
Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature, for the Age of Innocence.
That was a great novel, dramatized by the wonderful Martin Scorsese, with the extremely talented Daniel Day-Lewis. Wynona Rider and Michele Pfeiffer were also in the movie, in leading roles.
Both The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth have been included on the Modern Library List of best 100 books of the 20th century.
Such a fabulous writer can only write great stories we can assume.
Roman Fever develops slowly.
We have two old “friends” in the main roles: Mrs. Horace Ansley and Mrs. Delphin Slade.
Back in the old days, women were called by their husbands’ names. As we know, they did not have equal rights; on the contrary, they had to keep to the shadows of their spouses.
Mrs. Horace Ansley seems to be the “positive character”, while the other lady is cast in the role of the rather small villain.
Mrs. Delphin Slade does not kill anyone, although she did try to make her friend sick once upon a time.
They both have daughters that they are proud of, enjoying a good life and the company of aviators, aristocrats in the beautiful city of Rome.
One of the men is a Marchese.
Both women have lost their husbands, and as a coincidence they both died a few months from the other.
Roman Fever, the title of the story comes from the past. The grandmothers and mothers of the widows tried to keep their girls under control, when in Rome and in general.
The girls could get “Roman Fever”
And Mrs. Slade has tried to get her friend sick.
Because Mrs. Ansley became infatuated with Dolphin Slade, his then fiancée cooked up a plan to keep her would-be husband.
She wrote a letter:
-tCome to the Coliseum, after dark. It cannot go on like this- love D. S.
The trick was supposed to work. Her friend would wonder around the Coliseum, in the cold night and become ill in the process.
What we plan and what happens are two different things.
I will not get into the details to save the pleasure of a huge surprise that comes in the very last sentence of the story.
It is a master stroke. After a gradual, serene development of what seemed to be a story about atmosphere- with the descriptions of the evening in Rome, the moonlight, the girls and their romantic endeavors with the aviators, memories from the past- we come to a build up for a climax at the very end.
What a great writer and what a superb story!



You can read this legally here:

http://classiclit.about.com/library/b...

I had to read this book for my American Literature class. I didn't like at the beginning because it is written with really hard words. However, I HAD to read it in my class and eventually I like it a lot. It talks about problems in our society and how we care so much about others think.
It made me think about of a lot of stuff like: marriage, status, society and people in general.

An interesting array of short stories, most of which depict life in New York or abroad among the wealthy people of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some stories were better than others, but they all addressed human conditions in a way that makes the reader stop and think about what they’ve just read.

Edith Wharton had a way of pulling off a subtle twist that doesn’t jump out at you, but rather sneaks up in a way that you come to accept it rather than be startled by it.

3.5 stars rounded up here to 4.

The title story is now in my top 5 all-time favorite short stories, joining Lamb to the Slaughter, The Swimmer, and pretty much anything by Dorothy Parker. I haven't read Edith Wharton in several years and had forgotten the true pleasure of reading her razor-sharp characterizations and being constantly amazed at her ability to choose just the right word, in just the right place, in each and every sentence she writes. I feel an Edith Wharton binge coming on (as well as another visit to her gorgeous house in Lenox).

I LOVE ROMAN FEVER! Though I can be impartial to short stories, when I read this for class, I fell in love with it. I think I connect with it most because I have a childhood friend who always seemed to have everything, every opportunity, everything handed to her, and she walked all over her friends, including me, taking every advantage that came her way. So, when I read this story, I couldn't help but laugh, thinking Mrs. Ansley had the perfect revenge. I have no interest in seeking my own vengeance, but it was almost like just reading the story, and making the connection that I did, was my own little way of finally getting the upper hand.