4 - Fragile Freedoms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2010
Summary
Where [Edith Wharton] has made her mark here is in the creation of that vivid young creature Sophy Viner. Sophy is real; she lays hold of that in you which makes yourself real.
H. I. Brock, review of The ReefTo name God in oneself, or to speak the word “Goddess” again after many centuries of silence is to reverse age-old patterns of thinking in which male power and female subordination are viewed as the norm.
Carol Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing[Summer] is known to its author & her familiars as the Hot Ethan.… I don't know how on earth the thing got itself written.… Anyhow, the setting will amuse you.
Edith Wharton, Letter to Gaillard Lapsley“If I ever have children,” Edith Wharton wrote in her autobiography “Life and I,” “I shall deprive them of every pleasure, in order to prepare them for the inevitable unhappiness of life” (1091, original emphasis). Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver are, figuratively, two such children. However, Wharton had others less afflicted. She followed the compressed bleakness of Ethan Frome with a prodigious outpouring of fiction and nonfiction, including The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Xingu (1916), Summer (1917), French Ways and Their Meaning (1919), In Morocco (1920), and The Age of Innocence (1920).
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- Information
- Edith WhartonMatters of Mind and Spirit, pp. 127 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995