BECOMING ESTABLISHED

Wharton had no formal education but she was extremely well read and took advantage of her father's extensive library to immerse herself in European literature, art history and philosophy. Her first literary endeavors were with poetry but, in 1876, she produced her first novella, titled Fast and Loose, and using the pseudonym David Olivieri. She played out in her youthful imagination what it would be like to be a published author and made up reviews of the novella. The reviews themselves were a send-up of the condescending tone adopted by reviewers at this time, but they also reveal the aspiring writer's fear of failure. One of her mock reviews declares:

In short, in such a case, it is false to reader and writer to mince matters—the English of it is that every character is a failure, the plot a vacuum, the style spiritless, the dialogue vague, the sentiment weak, and the whole thing a fiasco. Is not—the disgusted reader is forced to ask—is not Mr. Olivieri very, very like a sick—sentimental school-girl who has begun her work with a fierce and bloody resolve to make it as bad as Wilhelm Meister, Consuelo, and ‘Goodbye Sweetheart’ together, and has ended with a blush, and a general erasure of all the naughty words which her modest vocabulary could furnish?¹

After her first book of poetry was privately printed in 1878 and a poem published in The World in 1879, there was a long gap before Wharton's next appearance in print. There was no encouragement from her family to pursue her literary interests and nothing but discouragement from her mother who did not deem it respectable for a young woman to write for publication. Wharton writes in her autobiography that she withdraw, after this, to “secret communion with the Muse,” filling sheets of wrapping paper with prose and poetry,

but the dream of a literary career, momentarily shadowed forth by one miraculous adventure, soon faded into unreality. How could I ever have supposed I could be an author? I had never even seen one in the flesh!²

The following ten or more years were taken up with her coming out, her father's death, and her marriage to Edward Wharton. During the early years of married life, Wharton was preoccupied with establishing her two households, gardening, travel, entertaining, and also ill health. She felt that her development as a writer was “retarded by the indifference of every one” about her but also saw this, in looking back, as having advantages such as not being hampered by “premature flattery” and not having been turned into a “local celebrity.”³

Her breakthrough came in 1891 with the publication of “Mrs. Manstey's View,” as she wrote in her memoirs:

[M]y literary career … began with the publishing, in “Scribner's Magazine,” of two or three short stories. The first was called “Mrs. Manstey's View,” the second “The Fullness of Life.” Both attracted attention, and gave me the pleasant flutter incidental to first seeing one's self in print…. I had as yet no real personality of my own, and was not to acquire one till my first volume of short stories was published—and that was not until 1899. This volume, called “The Greater Inclination,” contained none of my earlier tales, all of which I had rejected as not worth reprinting.⁴

Wharton took well more than a year, from the publication of her first story, to produce “The Fullness of Life.” Edward Burlingame, the editor at Scribner's, liked it but asked for revisions, commenting that the dialogue was too “soulful.” Wharton was unable to respond to his request promptly and she did not return the story to him until August 1893, hardly touched. She wrote expressing her regret that it was not better suited to his purposes.⁵ The previous December, however, she had sent him a thirty-thousand word novella, Bunner Sisters, but he rejected it on the grounds that it was too long to be placed in a single issue and that dividing it into two parts would make it too depressing. It was not published by Scribners until 1916 when Wharton was an established author at the peak of her career. In the fall of 1893 Burlingame responded enthusiastically to two stories that she sent him, “That Good May Come” and “The Lamp of Psyche,” and was prompted to suggest to her a volume of collected stories. Wharton was thrilled at the prospect:

I had been astonished enough to see the stories in print, but the idea that they might in the course of time be collected in a book never occurred to me till Mr. Brownell transmitted the Scribner proposal.

I had written short stories that were thought worthy of preservation! Was it the same insignificant I that I had always known? Any one walking along the streets might go into any bookshop, and say: “Please give me Edith Wharton's book,” and the clerk, without bursting into incredulous laughter, would produce it, and be paid for it, and the purchaser would walk home with it and read it, and talk of it, and pass it on to other people to read! The whole business seemed too unreal to be anything but a practical joke played on me by some occult humourist; and my friends could not have been more astonished and incredulous than I was.⁶

But, in March 1894, Edith Wharton began to lose confidence in her ability as a writer and was struggling with putting together stories for the proposed volume. She had sent him a story entitled “Something Exquisite” which he rejected outright. She wrote to Burlingame thanking him for his criticism and assuring him that she found it helpful, but clearly revealing that her faith in herself had been severely shaken. He did not hear from her for another eighteen months. In the interim she had suffered from a series of ailments and found it hard to write, although she did manage to produce The Decoration of Houses. By the summer of 1898, however, Wharton's creativity knew no bounds and she surprised Burlingame with the fruits of her sudden burst of productivity: four new stories and two revised stories. He felt she needed more exposure in Scribner's before the collected stories were published, which frustrated Wharton who tried to persuade him to proceed with the volume. In the end, she was forced to concede to his wishes and, finally, in March 1899, The Greater Inclination appeared in print. Priced at $1.50, the first run of 1,250 copies sold out by June. A further 1,000 copies were printed and sold and, in all, sales topped 3,000, signifying a respectable success for a new author.⁷

Then came the moment for her to read her first reviews:

They were unbelievably kind, but for the most part their praise only humbled me; and often I found it bewildering.⁸

One reviewer took her to task for not beginning her short stories with dialogue, which the reviewer considered to be absolutely de rigeur. Wharton was not that naïve, however, and found this preposterous. The publication of The Greater Inclination “called to life” her soul:

At last I had groped my way through to my vocation, and thereafter I never questioned that story-telling was my job, though I doubted whether I should be able to cross the chasm which separated the nouvelle from the novel. Meanwhile I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country, and I gloried in my new citizenship.⁹

Clearly, the publication of her first volume of short stories constituted a great release and affirmation for Wharton. In her memoirs, she described it as the breaking of chains that had held in a kind of torpor.¹⁰ She had tried to succeed in her role as a society hostess, but she now knew that her future lay with writing and in seeking out other writers and the kinds of people who shared her interests.

While Wharton was working on her first novel, The Valley of Decision, she came to an impasse after the first few chapters. She showed what she had written to Berry and he commented: “Don't worry about how you're to go on. Just write everything you feel like telling.” That advice, she wrote, enabled her rush ahead with her tale, letting it have its own momentum. Wharton paid tribute to Berry in her memoirs for teaching her to write.” He alone,” she wrote, “took the trouble to analyze and criticize.” He was a sensitive reader who discussed the minutiae of her writing, and his critique of her work became more exacting as she became more established as a writer. Walter Berry was her mentor for most of her literary career, starting with The Decoration of Houses which he helped to get into shape. In her memoirs, Wharton wrote that she doubted if “a beginner in the art ever had a sterner yet more stimulating guide.” He had, she wrote, great respect for the author's liberty and taught her never to be “affected by outside opinion.”¹¹

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Whether Wharton was totally inured to outside opinion is difficult to judge. She did, nevertheless, read the critical reviews of her work. When a publication was reviewed well, she was keen to ensure that the publisher advertised the work as aggressively as possible. She claimed that she was never discouraged by negative criticism but rather saw it as a challenge to improve on her writing.¹²

Critics were positive in their appraisal of The Decoration of Houses, and on the whole welcomed it as a useful addition to the nascent genre. Edwin Blashfield for Book Buyer was positive in his review and thought that the volume would be “a very present help to the many who realize that the material environment of home life has a real influence.”¹³ In the Nation's review, acknowledgment was made of the research that went into the writing of The Decoration of Houses, that, unlike its predecessors in the genre, it was grounded on history of interior decoration. The reviewer considered the instruction that it gave the public to be “intelligent” and “sensible.”¹⁴ Most reviewers picked up on the main theme concerning harmony and proportion, and saw the book as providing much needed instruction to Americans given the formative nature of interior decoration in such a new country.

Wharton's first volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination, was well received by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. She was praised for “felicity of touch, originality, skillfulness, assurance, subtlety, mastery of language, and cleverness.” But the one theme in the critical response which stands out is the comparison critics drew between her work and that of Henry James. This was a theme that was to haunt her most of her life and continues through to the present day.

In Literary World, John D. Barry commented that “Miss Edith Wharton” had clearly studied James closely and was influenced by his style.”¹⁵ Some of his worst faults of style she reproduces with skill that after a time becomes very amusing, notably his trick of repeating words, which in James himself is at times exasperating.” Barry evidently had little time for the later James and his comparison of Wharton with James was intended to be derogatory. Nevertheless, he concluded his review by saying that her book placed her “at once among the most promising of our more recent short-story writers.” A month later, Barry noted the amount of praise which Wharton's first volume of short stories was attracting and, interestingly, the fact that she did “not relish the frequent references made by her readers to her indebtedness to Henry James.”¹⁶

Harry Peck for the Bookman was lavish in his praise. He found The Greater Inclination a rare exception to the “mass of vapid novels, ephemeral romances, and all the poor, thin, tawdry, slipshod writing that comes pouring from the innumerable presses all over the country.” He too drew attention to her indebtedness to James but “with no intention whatsoever of regarding Mrs. Wharton as an imitator.” In fact, he found Wharton to be “superior in many ways” and therefore deserving of “a wholly independent criticism.”¹⁷ Nevertheless nearly a quarter of the review was taken up with discussing James, whose later work clearly evoked a great deal of debate among contemporary reviewers. In a similar vein, the reviewer for the Academy praised Wharton's skill and craftsmanship but pointing out a certain degree of derivation from James. This particular reviewer went one step further than Peck by suggesting that Wharton was “more articulate” than James.¹⁸ The reviewer for the Critic went even further in claiming that Wharton's stories gave the reader “a new appreciation of Mr. James and of the realistic method in general.”¹⁹

Aline Gorren, for the Critic, struck a completely different line in her review and focused on the gendered nature of writing and on the representation of women characters in male- and female-authored fiction. She mentions how often women writers have been accused of failing to create a plausible male character and counters this with the criticism of male authors to create plausible women characters. Gorren praises Wharton for her ability to “bring to the surface the underground movements of women's minds.” She sees her as a “psychologist” who creates New York characters who have “souls.”²⁰

Interestingly, John Barry picked up in Wharton's first literary publication her talent for dealing with the leisure class, which he considered a “fruitful field” for a novelist. He reflected that the society news in New York “for the past few months have offered material for many a curious study of our changing conditions.”²¹

The comparisons with James continued in the critical response to Wharton's first novella. Frequent references were made back to The Greater Inclination in terms of whether Wharton had lived up to her promise. On the whole, critical opinion felt that she had. Harry Peck concluded that the novella would give “the discriminating reader that rare delight which comes from the combination of remarkable intelligence, an extraordinary power of analysis, and a style that exemplifies precision, grace, lucidity, and above all, distinction.”²²

Notes

1. Quoted in Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977): 45.

2. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance in Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings (New York: Appleton, 1934; reprint edn New York: The Library of America, 1990): 841.

3. Ibid., 874-5.

4. Ibid., 868.

5. Quoted in Shari Benstock, No Gifts From Chance: a Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribners, 1994): 72.

6. Wharton, 868-9.

7. Benstock, 91-2.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 873.

10. Ibid., 875.

11. Ibid., 868, 870.

12. See Edith Wharton to William Crary Brownell, 25 June 1904, quoted in chapter 5.

13. Edwin Blashfield, Book Buyer 16 (March 1898): 129-33; reprinted in Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, eds. James W. Tuttleton, Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 5-7. Hereafter cited as Contemporary Reviews.

14. Nation 65, 16 December 1897, 485; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 3.

15. John D. Barry, “New York Letter,” Literary World, 1 April 1899, 105-06; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 13.

16. “New York Letter,” Literary World, 13 May 1899, 152-53; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 14. The reviewer for the New York Saturday Times Saturday Review also drew the comparison between Wharton's and James's work (Ibid., p. 18).

17. Harry Thurston Peck, “A New Writer Who Counts,” Bookman 9 (June 1899), 344-6; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 18-21.

18. Academy 57 (8 July 1899), 40; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 21-2.

19. Critic 35 (August 1899), 746-8; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 23-5.

20. Aline Gorren, Critic 37 (August 1900), 173-6; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 33-5.

21. Contemporary Reviews, 18.

22. Harry Thurston Peck, Bookman 11 (July 1900), 319-23; reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, 29-33.