SOURCE: Campbell, Donna M. “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses’: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton's Early Fiction.” Studies in American Fiction 22, no. 2 (autumn 1994): 169-83.

In the following essay, Campbell maintains that in Edith Wharton's “Mrs. Manstey's View” and Bunner Sisters the author “interfuses the city landscapes of naturalism with the potent iconography and themes of local color, providing a chilling commentary upon the limitations of local color fiction in a naturalistic world that encroaches upon the threatens its ideals.”

Edith Wharton's impatience with what she called the “rose and lavender pages” of the New England local color “authoresses” reverberates throughout her autobiography and informs such novels as Ethan Frome and Summer. In A Backward Glance she explains that Ethan Frome arose from her desire “to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life … utterly unlike that seen through the...