Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton is a writer I have long treasured. First, she writes beautifully. Second, her stories and characters are engaging. Third, she brilliantly portrays the lives and problems of the women of her time period (and in some ways, women of all time periods). Fourth, she teaches us so much about social class and how it worked and works. As someone who has studied and written about social class issues, I find her work fascinating and instructive in this regard. I also find myself with ambivalent feelings, as her portrayal of the luxurious life of the upper class has its glittering appeal, yet we also see its negative aspects: superficiality, callousness, inequity, even destructiveness. Wharton's "The House of Mirth," a novel I have read and taught several times, is illustrative of everything I have said above. The brilliant and beautiful but increasingly impoverished Lily Bart spends her time with those who have much more than she does, hopes for a marriage that will rescue her, but can't quite bring herself to give up her true self and her true love of a less affluent man in order to save herself financially. This decision costs her dearly, and she spirals downward to a sad end. Wharton was a great student of psychology and the human condition. She chose to write (mostly) about her own milieu, the world of the New York upper class, as that is where she found herself and that is what she could write best about, but she was well aware of other lives and of the wider world, and her work speaks to us still.