Biography Essay

While at the close of her career Edith Wharton was sometimes regarded as passe, a literary aristocrat whose fiction about people of high social standing had little to tell about the masses, particularly during the Jazz Age and the Depression, a countervailing view has begun to emerge in response to Edmund Wilson's call, after her death, for "justice" to Edith Wharton. In this counterview, Wharton is seen as a serious and deeply committed artist with a high respect for the professional demands of her craft, a woman praiseworthy for the generally high quality and range of her oeuvre, a novelist who wrote some of the most important fiction in the first quarter of the twentieth century, perhaps in American literary history. If this point of view has merit, her claim to attention arises from the clarity of her social vision, the particular angle of that vision...