As you can imagine the upkeep on a place like this is substantial, and they've had trouble keeping the place standing and open to the public down through the years.
Posted on 05/30/2017 4:47:00 PM PDT by Tax-chick
In February of 1901, Walter Berry, a lawyer and member of élite society in New York, expressed a regret in a letter written to his close friend Edith Wharton. “How I do wish I could run on to see the first rehearsal of the Shadow,” he wrote.
At the time, Wharton, who was thirty-nine years old, was not yet a novelist, having only published shorter fiction and poetry, as well as co-authoring, with Ogden Codman, “The Decoration of Houses,” an 1897 book about interior design. But she was a budding playwright, and, as two scholars have just deduced in an important bit of detective work, Berry’s glancing reference was to one of her works: “The Shadow of a Doubt,” a three-act play that was in production in 1901. It was to star Elsie de Wolfe as Wharton’s heroine, Kate Derwent, a former nurse married to John Derwent, a gentleman above her social station. Kate’s role in assisting the suicide of her husband’s former wife, Agnes, whom she tended to after an injury, is revealed in the course of the drama.
The production was cancelled, however, and the work slipped into obscurity. It is not mentioned by any of Wharton’s biographers, nor does Wharton mention it in her own memoir, “A Backward Glance,” in which, perhaps understandably, she skates over her brief and not especially successful career as a writer for the stage. (In the first years of the century, she had written a handful of plays, but “The Shadow of a Doubt” would have been her first professional production, had it materialized. Later, she collaborated on an adaptation of “The House of Mirth,” which proved less successful than hoped.)
It has now come to light thanks to the sleuthing of two scholars, Laura Rattray, who is a reader in American literature at the University of Glasgow, and Mary Chinery, a professor of English at Georgian Court University, in New Jersey. They are publishing their findings in the new issue of the Edith Wharton Review, and hope that the play’s discovery will shed new light on the period of Wharton’s life before her ascent to literary fame, as well as illuminating her better known works in previously unimagined ways. They also hope that it will be enjoyed by Wharton aficionados, and beyond. “I’m not going to claim that it is a lost masterpiece of the American stage,” Rattray told me. “But it has a really interesting female character at the core, and there are lots of witty one-liners.”
I don’t know who else will be interested in a recovered work by Edith Wharton, but I figured you would be.
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I ran across and bought copy of her "Italian Villas and Their Gardens" at a garage sale.
I thought the author's name was familiar but didn't know until later it was THE Edith Wharton.
She was famous for garden design in the South of France and in New England.
Imagine what she might have accomplished with a Women’s Studies Professor haircut like mine!
Or a nun-cut like mine?
Where was it discovered?
The researchers had seen a reference to the play's being removed from production in a New York Times archive.
Her best-known work is "The Age of Innocence", a novel set in upper-class New York City in the 1870's during the American "Gilded Era" (a time in American history noted for serious social and poverty problems masked by a thin "gilding" of much-flaunted wealth and prosperity of the country's upper classes.
Wharton was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930.
Actually, this is a fascinating time in American literature. Wharton's peers, friends and confidants were literary notables such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her biography alone is an absorbing read...and a good resume of her life can be found on Wikipedia.
The Gilded Age authors wrote fascinating pieces on the manners, mores, caste systems and psychology of this rather forgotten era of American history.
Leni
Glad I caught this headline!
She is one of my favorite authors....I’ve scoured used book sales to get ahold of her lesser-known tomes.
“Ethan Frome” is possibly the best novel ever written.....and my all-time fave.
Me, a big fan. Along with Henry James.
I like Henry James okay, but I like Edith Wharton better. I’m also fond of Willa Cather.
So am I!
I rarely post a thread, but I thought this was big news ;-).
Yes, and his brother William wrote an extraordinary book called “Varieties of Religious Experience”. Several versions of it have been printed and some are dreadful but the book is amazing.
I love Wharton, have almost everything she wrote.
Oh yes, Willa Cather! My Antonia...
And Maugham, Forester, Chesterton, some Kipling and a little Eliot.
I have tried probably ten times to read Joyce. I am incapable of reading stream of conciousness literature. At my age I don’t intend to pursue it further;)
As you can imagine the upkeep on a place like this is substantial, and they've had trouble keeping the place standing and open to the public down through the years.
Beautiful.
I read “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in school. Meh.
Excellent garden.
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