CBR 10 Bingo: This Old Thing; published 1911 Ethan Frome has been on my reading list for years, ever since I was enchanted by Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, for which Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921. The Age of Innocence is a lovely tale of thwarted love and sadly not the book I’m reviewing today. Ethan Frome is also a tale of lovers separated by circumstances, yet not nearly as engaging as Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The story takes place […]
Summertiiiiiiiime and the living is drearyyyyyy (for women)
I am a fan of Edith Wharton. I enjoyed Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and House of Mirth. Her writing is straightforward and is a time capsule of the turn of the century. She paints stark and vivid stories centering on women and the ways that they are boxed in by the circumstances of the time. Though she often focuses on the tiresome lives of the wealthy, Summer follows Charity, an orphan of mountain people, who is living her life of few opportunities in a […]
Newland Archer: OG F***boy
So pretty much Newland Archer is Ted Mosby. He is in love with one woman for his life but marries someone else because of the complications the first woman would create. There’s a certain type of man who feels like all emotions are charted along legal terms and therefore, as people who who feel can’t be held accountable if in fact he has not declared his love. This novel takes place in “Old New York” a false aristocratic society in which the sins of society […]
She was bad…always
This is the best of the four Edith Wharton novellas I read this weekend. It’s the most clearly realized, the least clever (as its main appeal) and the most that has something important to say about the social politics of America, not a requirement to be good, but one thing lacking from the previous novellas. This story starts off with Mrs. Hazledean rushing away from a fire in the 5th avenue hotel, a tremendous events that surely everyone will talk about. The problem for her […]
This is not a story-teller’s story
In this novella, a young man is more or less obsessed with an older man (in a friendly slash mentorly kind of way). He is pained when the older man’s wife yells at his object of obsession, but he slowly starts to realize he doesn’t know as much about the man as he once thought. But this is comedic story, so it’s not a dark secret. Instead, he finds out that this older man had fought in the Civil War, a fact that shocks him […]
Where are our Old Masters?
“Where is our Byron–our Scott–our Shakespeare? And in painting it is the same. Where are our Old Masters? We are not without contemporary talent; but for works of genius we must still look to the past; we must, in most cases, content ourselves with copies…” This sort of lays the groundwork for the anxiety held within this novella. Written in the 1920s, there’s still a kind of irony that Wharton also has missed some of the greats of American literature. While she was a huge […]