I haven't read Edith Wharton since high school. I don't even remember what we read.

A colleague stopped by my desk at school last week, and said his wife put Roman Fever into his hands and told him to read it.

He was amazed:
1) that he had never heard of this jewel and,
2) at the cruelty of women.
He piqued my interest.

I checked our catalog and we had it, so I threw it into my bag. A few nights later I picked it up while I was waiting for the evening news to start. I never saw Brian Williams that night.

How is it possible that I had never heard of this short story? Two middle aged women, life-long friends, sitting on a terrace in Rome, overlooking the Palatine at sunset, and reminiscing over their shared youth. Their two daughters, one a lovely angel and the other a brilliant spark of glamor and laughter, have left their mothers to their knitting, and are off to do exciting things with their evening.

Widows, their lives revolve around daughters who don't require the chaperoning they themselves had experienced as young women in Rome. Time hangs heavy. And in the golden sun of that late afternoon, secrets begin to slip out. Jealousy. Past betrayal. And then came the last line of the story. I was stunned, taken completely and totally by surprise, almost breathless. I shut the book, took off my glasses and sat still, taking in the implications of the final sentence. And then I opened the book and read it again.

The next day I tracked down my colleague and we compared observations, talking over one another in our enthusiasm, our words crowding out the noise of the hallway as the bell rang and students swarmed the halls between classes. When he told me Roman Fever was part of the English curriculum I was elated!

This afternoon I was walking down the hallway in the English wing, and as I passed a full classroom I heard a teacher yell out. She had paused her class and was calling to me "I heard you read Roman Fever!" Spinning on my heel I raced back to the class and 23 freshmen turned to look at me.

"Edith Wharton! Who knew?" my hands were out, palms up, demanding an explanation.
"I KNOW!" she exclaimed. "Were you surprised?"
"Still recovering. I can't believe I never read this. Edith, I hardly knew you!"

As I left the classroom I could hear the teacher saying "You see!" with a note of victory in her voice. "Mrs. Cicchetti LOVED it!"

For a moment I felt like those ladies on the terrace. The twists and surprises of life give you new eyes. If I had read Roman Fever in high school, would it have moved me in the same way? Because, you see, I have become that lady on the terrace with her knitting. It is now my glorious daughter dancing off into her future, while I am settled in my present. Perhaps Edith Wharton needs to be read at different stages of life, through different lenses of experience, to be truly appreciated.

What a joy, to be taken so totally by surprise by a story.

I enjoyed this collection of what are considered some of Edith Wharton's finest short stories so much that I read it all over again, right after reading it the first time.

Some of the themes are familiar, such as people's sense of identity and social acceptance in upper-class society, but there is a large range of storylines, many of which deal with marital relationships and their various endings.
Wharton doesn't waste space on overly detailed descriptions of places or things; she zooms right into the heart of the matter. An outstanding collection of writing that I believe will stay with the reader for a long time after the last page is turned.

Great story!! What a surprising ending!! I love how the narrative evolves, how deep the resentments run. Two old friends, two daughters, the past haunting them!

A very nice collection of eight short stories from Edith Wharton, with three true gems: ‘Roman Fever’, ‘Xingu’, and ‘After Holbein’. As in much of Wharton’s oeuvre, you’ll find themes of the mores of Old New York society, the stigma of divorce, and characters feeling trapped by the situation they’re in. The build-up and ending to ‘Roman Fever’ is fantastic, and a reminder of just how good she was at finishing a story. Intellectual pretension is satirized in ‘Xingu’, and the sad effect of aging on the mind is haunting and touching in ‘After Holbein’. The stories were not originally published together, and looking up the when they were was interesting:

Roman Fever (1934)
Xingu (1911)
The Other Two (1904)
Souls Belated (1899)
The Angel at the Grave (1901)
The Last Asset (1904)
After Holbein (1928)
Autres Temps… (1916)

It was also interesting to place them relative to Wharton’s timeline and what I consider her masterpieces: ‘The House of Mirth’ (1905), ‘The Reef’ (1912), her divorce at age 51 after 28 years of marriage (1913), Pulitzer Prize winning ‘The Age of Innocence’ (1920), and her death at age 75 (1937). ‘Souls Belated’ was among her earliest writing, and ‘Roman Fever’ among her last, so it’s a collection that spans her career.

Quotes:
On aging, from ‘After Holbein’:
“Yes; his mind, at that moment, had been quite piercingly clear and perceptive; his eye had passed with a renovating glitter over every detail of the daily scene. He stood still for a minute under the leafless trees of the Mall, and looking about him with the sudden insight of age, understood that he had reached the time of life when Alps and cathedrals become as transient as flowers.”

On identity, from ‘The Other Two’:
“Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many directions. Alice Haskett – Alice Varick – Alice Waythorn – she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.”

On the past, from ‘Autres Temps…’:
“When she was alone, it was always the past that occupied her. She couldn’t get away from it, and she didn’t any longer care to. During her long years of exile she had made her terms with it, had learned to accept the fact that it would always be there, huge, obstructing, encumbering, bigger and more dominant that anything the future could ever conjure up. And, at any rate, she was sure of it, she understood it, knew how to reckon with it; she had learned to screen and manage and protect it as one does an afflicted member of one’s family.”

On relationships, from ‘Souls Belated’:
“They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational.”

"You might need oven mitts to read this one, there are some serious burns in here" -my friend, as she handed me Roman Fever and Other Stories by Edith Wharton

"Roman fever", "Xingu", and "Angel at the grave" are definite stand outs, exquisite storytelling that captivated me in a way that seldom short stories do. The rest, however, notoriously lacked in impact by contrast. Nonetheless, will revisit Wharton. Especially interested in her Ghost stories collection published by NYRB.

Now THIS is The Good Stuff!!!

I really liked a few of these short stories. “Roman Fever” had some great reveals, very tight. “After Holbein” built to a really funny final scene. And “Xingu” was one of the funniest short stories I’ve ever read. It’s amazing when comedy holds up that well for 100+ years.

I love how books written a century ago can continue to be relevant. Her ability to parse human emotions and how societal restrictions impact relationships is spot on. Plus it's fascinating to read about how the uber wealthy lived at the turn of the prior century. But how different is it really?

I always forget how much I love Edith Wharton until I read her again!

After the blood and guts of n  Blood Meridiann, I needed to add a little civilization back into my reading life - and nobody does over-civilization like Edith Wharton. Whether they meet the challenge by laughing, crying, or overdosing on exhaustion and sleeping pills, her characters are beset on all sides by the constrictions of unimaginative convention - a force with which McCarthy's cowboys are entirely untroubled.

I have a mixed history with Wharton; I found The House of Mirth overwrought, and wouldn't have been inspired to read The Age of Innocence except that I ran across a pristine Norton edition of it for under ten dollars. (Would I read anything if given a free Norton edition of it? Probably anything but Walden.) When I finally got around to cracking it open, I was surprised at my hearty enjoyment: it's a later, more mature novel, and Wharton displays her delightful satiric edge to a far greater advantage. With more distance from her subjects, I felt she could both enjoy them more herself, and allow her reader a bit of breathing room. I felt the same way about the short story collection Roman Fever and Other Stories: Wharton is most enjoyable, to me, when she is in rollicking satirical mode, or at least writing drama with a satirical edge, rather than giving in to full-blown melodrama. One of my favorite stories, "Xingu," is a famous example of Wharton at her cutting, cackling best: a clique of haughty New York society matrons are looking forward to giving a luncheon for a famous female author, and lamenting the necessity of inviting their least fashionable member, as she's bound to spoil the atmosphere. She simply doesn't know how to behave, the ladies tell each other. Why, just the other day she was so outré as to ask Mrs. Plinth her personal opinion of the book they were discussing:

It was the kind of question that might be termed out of order, and the ladies glanced at each other as though disclaiming any share in such a breach of discipline. They all knew there was nothing Mrs. Plinth so much disliked as being asked her opinion of a book. Books were written to be read; if one read them what more could be expected? To be questioned in detail regarding the contents of a volume seemed to her as great an outrage as being searched for smuggled laces at the Custom House. The club had always respected this idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Plinth's. Such opinions as she had were imposing and substantial: her mind, like her house, was furnished with monumental "pieces" that were not meant to be disarranged; and it was one of the unwritten rules of the Lunch Club that, within her own province, each member's habits of thought should be respected. The meeting therefore closed with an increased sense, on the part of the other ladies, of Mrs. Roby's hopeless unfitness to be one of them."

When the author in question turns out to be even more of a pill than her Lunch Club companions, Mrs. Roby manages to get her own by introducing "Xingu" as a topic of conversation: nobody knows what it is, but they're not willing to admit their ignorance, and hilarity ensues.

On a darker satirical note, I also loved "After Holbein," which is almost a ghost story but written about a still-living people. According to Hermione Lee's biography, Wharton loved ghost stories and wrote a number of them throughout her life, and "After Holbein" has many of the tell-tale conventions: huge mansions that used to be grand centers of entertainment, now mostly sheeted and run with a skeleton staff; a dark night; a past estrangement; the impression of a whole world that has slipped into the past. But rather than ghosts, this setting is populated by two ancient denizens of Old New York: Mrs. Jaspar, stroke victim and erstwhile society hostess, and the decrepit Anson Warley (based on Ward McAllister, the super-elite arbiter of Old New York Society and author of the list designating the members of "The 400" who would be invited to Mrs. Astor's yearly ball and therefore be "received"). While Mrs. Jaspar badgers her maid into preparing her, night after night, for the same dinner party she was to give on the eve of her stroke, Mr. Warley engages in an interior monologue about how many invitations he still receives, and how young he still feels. He's planning to go out this very night, despite the disapproval of his valet. He gloats to himself that he's still "in the running" - not like that fossilized Mrs. Jaspar, whom he remembers snubbing wittily in his youth to the delight of all his many society friends. He spares a moment to hope that his barbed witticism didn't get back to the lady herself, but can't be too bothered about it. He shakes off his valet and steps outside - only to forget which of his friends invited him to dine. The outcome of the night for both Mrs. Jaspar and Mr. Warley is deliciously creepy - much more so than if the two friends and rivals were actually coming back from the dead to haunt the dinner tables and ballrooms of their pasts. Their lives as living fossils also allows Wharton, writing from her home in Paris after having forsworn everything her characters stand for, to comment on the few remaining New Yorkers still yearning after the old ways, the old society - and more than that, to comment on people, like Anson Warley, who become so entrenched in their routines of pandering to others, that they are left with little or no inner life of their own. As a character in the final story implies, the only rational cure for over-civilization is to promote a rich inner life, and these relics of Old New York certainly don't have it:

We're all imprisoned, of course - all of us middling people, who don't carry our freedom in our brains.

There was another story in the collection that interested me for more personal reasons, although it was in Wharton's dramatic, rather than satirical, mode: "Souls Belated" tells of a woman, recently divorced, who wants to continue living with her lover unmarried, rather than attempt to rejoin their former stuffy, hypocritical society by accepting the state sanction of marriage a second time. I don't write about it much here, but I live in a long-term, committed relationship in which both I and my partner have chosen, for personal and political reasons, not to get married but to safeguard our legal rights in other ways. I've always felt uncomfortable with the cultural baggage around marriage, and it was fascinating to read a story featuring a character who had a related set of feelings. As you might imagine, it doesn't happen very often: there are scads of happy and unhappy marriages in literature, plenty of illicit love affairs and passionate flings, lots of unrequited love, and a few portraits of people who find themselves happier leading a single life, but not a lot of stories about the attempt to live in a caring, committed way outside the bounds of matrimony - especially when those attempts are chosen, rather than forced. (If you know of any, I would love to check them out.) Unfortunately for Wharton's characters, their particular attempt doesn't end very well: the woman's lover doesn't understand her unwillingness to marry him, and she finds, to her disgust, that they both care more about the opinion of Society than they imagined. Wharton's own attitude toward her protagonist, while sympathetic, seems to me slightly rueful at the woman's idealism. Still, it was an interesting and perceptive read, and made me think about how my own situation would have differed had I been born a century earlier - and, it goes without saying, wealthy.

Overall, this slim volume of shorts was just what the doctor ordered as an antidote to Cormac McCarthy - subtle and thoughtful, often melancholy, sometimes deliciously sardonic.

If you want to expand your vocabulary, read Wharton! My favorite from the pack was Xingu.