Old New York Novellas Ranked:
1. The Old Maid - the longest and most detailed. accordingly, there was more to get into
2. New Year's Day - surprising!
3. False Dawn - almost like a parable
4. The Spark - I didn't understand what was happening for most of it.

I reviewed each short story separately but New Year's Day was by far the best of the bunch!

I read this as a teenager. Like all Wharton works, I highly recommend it to any feminist fascinated by the Victorian age.

"Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins." (p 228)

I love Edith Wharton. She's so dark and has such an amazing grip on the pre-Gilded Age and Old New York (1840s to 1870s) that I would consider her books a must-read for research for the time period, even though they are novels, not nonfiction. This is a collection of four novellas that span those four decades, and the stories are not all created equal, but they are all good (and maudlin, heartbreaking, indulgent, as Wharton always is), especially "The Old Maid" and "New Year's Day." Wharton's writing always deals with consequences of actions, usually selfish ones, but she understands her characters' darkness and human depravity better than almost any other writer I know.

I never tire of Edith Wharton’s writing. Every word counts!
Reading New Year’s Day this time, I’m struck by how it’s kind of like an alternate ending for House of Mirth. What might have happened had Lily actually married.

Edith Wharton never disappoints.

Lately, I’ve begun a romance with Edith Wharton. After rereading The House of Mirth for a class, I became enamored with Wharton’s writing style in which every sentence has several nuances, each description is carefully tailored. When I stumbled upon n  Old New Yorkn at Barnes & Noble, I had to have more, to slake my thirst for Edith Wharton’s beautiful prose.

The Collection

Old New York is a collection of four short stories, each one taking place in a different decade of the 19th century. In a couple of the stories, Wharton does something that I found uncharacteristic of her: she drops in names of other literary figures like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, John Ruskin and Dante Rosetti. Wharton accomplishes this apparent name-dropping with light-handed subtlety.

It’s easier for me to compare the stories in Old New York to Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, the setting of which is during her parents’ generation. Although I like The House of Mirth better than The Age of Innocence, the latter is more widely known and more popular, possibly because its ending is not so very tragic.

The first story, False Dawn, takes place in the 1840s. Lewis Raycie travels to Europe to “finish” his education. His tight-fisted father gives him an enormous allowance and a second allowance with which to purchase “Old Masters” paintings. The father wants to start a museum with the paintings the son brings back from Europe, but Lewis does not exactly bring home what the father expects. He further disgraces himself by marrying the penniless cousin of their neighbors. Wharton interweaves this story of a domineering father and his son’s apparent rebellion with irony and a touch of pity.

In the second story, The Old Maid, Charlotte Lovell has an illegitimate daughter. Charlotte’s best friend, Delia Lovell Ralston, takes in the daughter because she suspects Charlotte’s lover was also the man with whom she first fell in love. After Delia’s husband dies, The two women set up house together with Delia’s children and Charlotte’s daughter who calls Delia “mother.” This story has larger ramifications and provides inside commentary into the condition of women in 1850s society and the finer points of jealousy.

In The Spark, a young man ponders the character and motivations of Hayley Delane’s apparent complete disregard of his younger wife’s infidelities. The young man reconstructs his conversations with Delane after a scene in which Delane thrashes his wife’s lover at a polo match--not for dallying with his wife, but for mistreating his horse. Though set some years later, the young narrator learns that Delane was a veteran of the Civil War during the 1860s and how his experiences have colored his life since.

In the last story, New Year’s Day, Wharton presents once again the theme of infidelity in which a young wife, Lizzie Hazeldean, has an affair with another member of her set, despite her deep love for and devotion to her sickly husband. New York society, upon learning of her affair, cuts Lizzie, but they neither know nor understand her underlying motivations. Of the four stories in this volume, I liked the ambiguousness of this one the best.

Overall

If you’re an Edith Wharton fan, or like the “novel of manners” style, I highly recommend Old New York. These stories are a much better introduction to Edith Wharton than Ethan Frome, that’s forced on most high school students because of its brevity rather than its content. I think one should read other Wharton works before The House of Mirth, and this collection is an enjoyable way to work up to the Wharton classics.

this took me forever to finish but it was so good. i love edith wharton she writes such captivating and human characters. the old maid and new year’s day were my fav stories ❤️

It is Edith Wharton writing about Old New York, so of course this is great.

This book is four novellas published in 1924. The four are set in different decades in the 1800s', the Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties and the Seventies in New York. I liked two of them, but the other two I did not find interesting.

There was a lot of infidelity.

Old short stories don't have the same kind of zip as modern ones. Their pacing is leisurely like a novel. These are essentially four long short stories. Each story is supposed to represent a decade: The 1840's, '50s, '60s and '70s. But the action in the '60s story really takes place in the '90s. Wharton throws these decades around like they should mean something to the reader. This is something for current writers to consider. Will a reader from 2120 understand the nuances between the 1960s and '70s. Should the author risk being pedantic explaining something that all its readers intuitively understand? In a Wharton story, I can judge the modernity based on how divorce is looked upon. Is it completely taboo, sorta taboo, or screw it, any rich person can do it and get away with it? But I'll admit, I have no idea when overhead lights became a thing in New York City society.

Anyway, a Wharton story doesn't live or die on interior decorating, but on the thwarted dreams of her richly drawn characters. "The Old Maid" is the most well-known of her stories, and rightly so. I liked learning about how what life could be like for an unwed high-society mother. Wharton examines two frenemies in in-depth way that I don't recall from other novels. I'm tempted to recommend it to Wharton virgins, but I guess I would go with Ethan Frome, which is only slightly longer. If you can withstand that trauma-filled text unscathed, the rest of the Wharton cannon will be smooth sailing. If it's too much sorrow, you can save yourself the heartache of reading longer works hoping against hope for a happy ending that will never come.

I particularly liked the 1840s story "False Dawn" where a young man is ruined by the acquisition of classic Italian art that is far too ahead of the curve for conservative New York. Yes, he was right and everyone else was wrong, but a fat lot of good that did himself and his poor family.

The 1860s but really 1890s story "The Spark" was interesting for two reasons. First, it brought up how society New York dealt with participation or non-participation in the Civil War. Just like the Viet Nam war, rich people could find ways to get out of fighting. Secondly, the story purports that New York society felt that it was ok for the owner of a polo horse to whip it mercilessly because it was his horse and he could do with it however he wanted. The hero in the story whips the offender, but society is against him because the horse-whipper happens to be the hero's wife's lover, and it was bad form. The hero happened to be in the calvary in the Civil War, and is a board member of the SPCA. The SPCA was created in England in 1824, 100 years before Wharton published Old New York in 1924. Was Wharton playing fast and loose with history? She's always struck me as a pretty faithful historian of society, so I'm inclined to believe her, but I do have my doubts.