am tras de ea 2 luni. mi s-a parut simpatica prima povestire, chiar daca a fost foarte previzibila, insa mai departe m-am plictisit teribil, e peste puterile mele sa mai citesc ultimele 90 pagini. Poate m-am obisnuit prea mult cu stilul alert al literaturii contemporane. Nu e rea. Just not my type.

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, The Age of Innocence remains one of my favorite novels.No one writes about rich people shenanigans with humanity the way that she does. This book contains 4 novellas set within different decades. In these novellas, you see how each character(s) deals with their passions, losses and disappointments within the confides and expectations of New York society.

PS: My favorite novellas were The Old Maid (the 50s) and and New Years Day (the 70s): two novellas with a common theme. They were both about complicated women (who “good” society had ignored, judged or cast aside) willing to make enormous sacrifices to ensure that their loved ones were safe, happy and cherished.

3.5 STARS

"Set in the New York of the 1840s, '50s, '60s, and '70s, the four short novels in this collection each reveal the tribal codes and customs that ruled society, portrayed with the keen style that is uniquely Edith Wharton's. Originally published in 1924 and long out of print, these tales are vintage Wharton, dealing boldly with such themes as infidelity, illegitimacy, jealousy, the class system, and the condition of women in society Included in this remarkable quartet are False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year's Day." (From Amazon)

I only read one novella - OLD MAID - and it was a great piece of Old New York that only Wharton can write. This story is the basis for the Bette Davis and Marion Hopkins film by the same name.

I always love Wharton's view of New York society and False Dawn is a wonderful novella about the wealthy families of the mid-19th century New York and their relationship with money (old and new) and art - acquiring it, appreciating it, and using it to demonstrate their standing in society. Does Edith Wharton really need my review? She's brilliant. Read her.

The four short novels by the author of The Age of Innocence are set in the New York of the 1840's, 1850's, 1860's and 1870's.

The first, False Dawn, describes a father-son relationship that falls apart. Paintings are involved.

The second, The Old Maid, and her best known, involves a woman's illegitimate child adopted by her best friend with devastating results.

The third, The Spark, deals with a man's moral rehabilitation.

And the fourth, New Year's Day (and my favorite), is an O.Henryesque tale of a married woman suspected of adultery.

I have read Age of Innocence and this book caries on in the tradition of describing eras and the rules and customs that describe society. I have a copy of this book bought in San Jose CA when I visited my friend there. I treasure the book, the trip and my friend.

5 stars

I don't think I have ever read anything written by Edith Wharton. Well, I loved this book and am not usually a fan of short stories. But these are "shaped more as character studies" and felt like a peek through a window to the past wealthy New York lives. Four stories starting with
False Dawn (set in the 1840s), with a coming-of-age boy from a wealthy family sent on a Europe tour (common for boys of his situation then) who will bring back paintings for his dad's "planned" Art gallery. Alas, the boy will not follow his paternal's recommendations, will bring back a bunch of vulgar paintings from painters never heard of, and will be finishing his life in poverty.
The Old Maid (set in the 1850s) is heartbreaking and also full of compassion story (maybe too much compassion? No, you are never too compassionate!) and the realization of one who spent (literally) her life without much love/excitement or purpose but still had a good honest heart able to give/take and realize that give was best.
The Spark (set in the 1860s) is the shortest story about an older gentleman, much older than his look, married to a younger "volage" woman. It's from the point of view of a young man who has always been intrigued by this older gentleman and who will become a friend and a confidant.
New Year's Day (set in the 1870s) is maybe my favorite of the 4th because of its sadness and the fact that the main character, a woman, will somehow "prevail." Lizzy Hazeldean is a young lady married to a man whose health is failing, and she has a lover. Multiple people from her "circle" (Upper-Class New York) will see her escape the 5th Avenue Hotel's fire with her lover (they happened to be at a get-together in an apartment overlooking the hotel and were "enjoying" the firefighters and people escapes "show" when they recognized them both). She will be shunned by some, her husband will die, and she will leave the country. Fast forward a few years, she's a young widow back in New York, and her former lover comes to marry her as a "grand gesture" to erase the stain of their past…but wait: Lizzie does not, has never loved him and tells him that their relation was her only mean to have enough money for her husband to be taken care of and not worried of her and their finances. She has now inherited from an older aunt, does not want to marry, and does not care to evolve in that upper circle anymore.
I enjoyed these beautifully written stories and will have this author in mind when I run out of books.

On reading Wharton again I was just amazed at what a flawless writer she is. Her descriptions and dialogue flow like water, and her numerous narratives are inevitably seamlessly woven together. She also again demonstrates her inimitable ability to divine social meaning in mundane actions and objects.

Wharton's hypersensivity to social cues obviously comes from growing up in the rarefied world of the Old New York aristocracy, which she again gently pillories in these four stories. She comes at them like an anthropologist (even using the language of "totems" and "fetishes") and conveys both the absurdity of their world and also the abstruse skills necessary to thrive in it. Overall, it's a fascinating picture of a vanished world and of the characters that populated it.

On a bit of a Wharton binge. Not as satisfying as her novels, but enjoyable nonetheless.

These four novellas lend an insight into the mores of the upper crust of New York society of the mid-19th century. I thought it was interesting how modern some of the situations and plot felt, even though some of the customs were obviously of another age. It seems some of the societal pressures of marriage and morality could still exist in modern New York society, especially that of the richer classes, which are always a bit more conservative.

I did enjoy some of the stories more than others. 'The Spark' was the weakest of the four, since it seemed to always be on the edge of saying something but never getting there. The other three felt more accessible. False Dawn, the first story, was so exquisitely sad and didn't go where I first expected it to, which was a nice surprise. The Old Maid was strongly written and set up the two main characters very well. I understand why Wharton used the younger narrator to frame the story of New Year's Day, but it felt much more like a contrivance. The first two stories of the book did not have a character narrating (although one pops up at the end of False Dawn he does not intrude at all before that), which seems to be the reason they were stronger. The narrator in New Year's Day was the troubling bit of the story. Wharton had to write him in with convolutions of the story, which served to lose the emotional kernel of the story in the mix.

Altogether, I enjoyed these novellas and the glimpses into old New York, and I am now interested in reading Wharton's longer works.

This is Wharton's view of a New York in which old Dutch money is slowly giving way to the new masters of commerce, told in stories of successive decades. It is a world in which appearance is important in ways that can scarcely matter now: being tubercular is better than being an unwed mother, prostitution is conceivable as a way of keeping up the illusion of family wealth. Wharton has a little fun at the expense of these Philistines: the fey son of a great family rebels by collecting then-unfashionable early Italian art like Giotto; a man who knew Whitman during the Civil War happens upon his book and finds it to be "rubbish." From the perspective of the 1920s when it was written, "Old New York" has a bit of an antiquarian air; its criticism of American society and mores has none of the vitality of "The Great Gatsby" (an unfair comparison, I know), as if Wharton had faced the question of how to depict a suffocating society in a lively way; the Whitman piece is the least successful, and most trifling. The last one, about the woman who preserves her husband's illusions through prostitution, did seem fresh and biting.

I read AGE OF INNOCENCE in high school and remember enjoying it but finding the ending depressing and frustrating. I picked this up years later and read the novellas all out of order. "The Old Maid" seemed to be in the same frustrating-resolution vein as the novel I remembered. "False Dawn" was similar, though had very different subject matter.

The other two I found a bit more uplifting, even though "New Year's Day" isn't happy per se. "Sparks" was my favorite.

Lately I have been reading Edith Wharton and Henry James in an interspersed fashion. James I am following chronologically, Wharton I am not but I wish I were. Most of these works are rereads and I am delighted to be visiting some of these books for a second time. This was particularly the case with Old New Yok. It became a New Old New York for me.

I picked it up as I was getting on a plane to fly to NY. For this visit I had decided to concentrate on the architecture of the city, both the old buildings and the history of how NY was planned out, as well as some of the more recent buildings. For this I had read The City Observed: N.Y. .

Wharton's novellas, published in 1924, are also laid out historically, covering the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. So they fall under the category of historical fiction. Although Wharton includes as subtitle to each of her novellas the decade on which it is concentrated, her narration often is set in a later date at which a 'narrator' tells us what had happened 'before'.

There is a fair amount of I was not so aware of this in my first read. This time I was also conscientiously tracking any topographical references to the city and trying to imagine it visually. My (mentally) visual landmarks were amongst others Trinity Church, which by the 1840s was already its third building. This church was the tallest building in the city until the Brooklyn Bridge was finished in 1883. So the reader really has to erase from one's mind a great deal of what he/she knows about the appearance of New York.




The first story, False Dawn, or the 1840s, seemed just a bit forced or far fetched since one of the themes, the change in art historical appreciation that took place, mostly in England, during the 19thC and led by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood officially began in 1848. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading the philistine atmosphere Wharton creates in which the appreciation of the early Italian Renaissance painters (Piero, Angelico, 'Carpatcher', Giotto) is ironically derided. I also had to smile when I came upon:

nRuskin--Ruskin--just plain John Ruskin, eh? And who is this great John Ruskin, who stets God's A'mighty right in his judgments? Who'd you say John Ruskin's father was, now?"

and

You said there was a Mr Brown and a Mr Hunt and a Mr Rossiter, was it?n

The second novella, The Old Maid, or the 1850s, is widely seen as the most accomplished one. The analyses of character are captivating. But again, following my new interest I was centered on any topographical mentioning of Gramercy Park, Irving Place, the Bowery and Waverly Place. The names also captivated me, seeing them as shadows of the gilded ones, such as the Vandergraves (Vanderbilts), the Ralstons (Randolphs), the Lovells (Lowels). As I found it striking that the Dutch continued to make such a strong colonial presence given that the new York had been the old new Amsterdam for only thirty-nine years.



The third one, The Spark, or the 1860s, inevitably had to have allusions to the Civil War, but for these to work with some perspective, the tale had to be told about three decades later. After having read the ambivalent reaction of the James family regarding the war, in this read I was paying attention to the reaction of the characters in general about those who did or did not participate in the fight. This is possibly the weakest of the four novellas, and it again acquired a contrived flavor easily generated in historical fiction. The mysterious personage had to be Walt Whitman, of course. Who else?


Frank Weston Benson, Portrait of a Lady. 1901.

The last one, New Year's Day, or the 1870s, is very much à la Wharton in the development of the main female character. But here I was paying attention too to the chameleonic nature of 5th Avenue where both mansions and hotels in which women could gamble their reputation coexisted.

And so when coming to the end one imagines the author seeing herself and her younger double facing this lost panorama:

n  And they breathed a joint sigh over the vanished 'Old New York' of their youth, the exclusive and impenetrable New York to which Rubini and Jenny Lind had sung and Mr Thackeray lectured, the New Hork which had declined to receive Charles Dickens, and which, our of revenge, he had do scandalously ridiculed.n