House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [15]
Lily is granted a more easeful death than other fallen women who commit suicide in nineteenth-century novels, and is spared Emma Bovary’s prussic acid, Anna Karenina’s fall under a train, and Maggie’s death (in Stephen Crane’s novella) by drowning. Lily, a tragic heroine, had to die rather than survive and marry Selden. As Wharton explained in A Backward Glance, “a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.” 27 Only Lily’s death could lead her as well as Selden to that “sharpening of the moral vision which makes all human suffering so near and insistent” (p. 162).28
Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published forty-three books, including biographies of Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and George Orwell. His life of Somerset Maugham will be published by Knopf in February 2004.
Notes to Introduction
1. Somerset Maugham, The Vagrant Mood (1952; London: Mandarin, 1988), pp. 197, 199. In Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 521, R. W. B. Lewis mistakenly writes that Wharton never met Maugham.
2. Jeffrey Meyers, Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins,1994), pp. 156-157.
3. Edith Wharton, Letters, edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribner‘s, 1988), p. 5.
4. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934. Reprint: New York: Scribner’s, 1964), p. 73.
5. Quoted in Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 142.
6. Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (1974. Reprint: New York: Ballantine, 1976), p. 206.
7. Edmund Wilson, The Forties, edited with an introduction by Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), p. 209.
8. Quoted in Henry James and Edith Wharton, Letters, 1900-1915, edited by Lyall Powers (New York: Scribner‘s, 1990), p. 16.
9. Lewis and Lewis, Introduction to Edith Wharton, Letters, p. 17.
10. Edmund Wilson, The Twenties, edited and with an introduction by Leon Edel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), p. 76.
11. Henry James, Letters: Volume IV, 1895-1916, edited by Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 237.
12. James, Letters: Volume IV, p. 373.
13. Virginia Woolf, Letters: Volume Five, 1932-1935, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), p. 305.
14. John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 129.
15. Louis Auchincloss, “Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks,” Reflections of a Jacobite (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), pp. 13-14.
16. Edith Wharton, Introduction to The House of Mirth (1936), in Uncollected Critical Writings, edited and with an introduction by Frederick Wegener (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 265-266, 268-269.
17. Wharton, Letters, pp. 96-97, 99.
18. Edith Wharton, “Mr. Sturgis’ Belchamber,” Bookman, 21 (May 1905), 309-310.
19. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), p. 335.
20. Jean de la Bruyère, “On Women,” Characters, translated by Jean Stewart (London: Penguin, 1970), pp. 55-68.
21. In the psychoanalytical A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 117, Cynthia Griffin Wolff makes a Freudian slip and refers to her as “Mrs. Penniston.” Many of Wharton’s critics, thinking of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (written in 1905, but not published until 1912), misspell Carry Fisher’s first name.
22. Wharton, Letters, p. 94.
23. D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1926), Complete Short Stories (New York: Viking, 1961), vol. 3, p. 791.
24. Quoted in Lewis, Edith Wharton, p. 548.
25. Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (1934. Reprint: New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 339.
26. Irving Howe, “The Achievement of Edith Wharton,” Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Irving Howe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962), p. 15.
27. Wharton, Backward Glance, p. 207.