SOURCE: Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. “‘Not Precisely War Stories’: Edith Wharton's Short Fiction from the Great War.” Studies in American Fiction 23, no. 2 (autumn 1995): 153-72.

In the following essay, Olin-Ammentorp traces Edith Wharton's reaction to World War I as viewed through her short stories.

On June 28, 1915, Edith Wharton wrote to her publisher Charles Scribner regarding both her experiences in wartime France and her plans for writing in the near future. “I have been given such unexpected opportunities for seeing things at the front,” she reported, “that you might perhaps care to collect the articles (I suppose there will be five) in a small volume to be published in the autumn”—the volume that was to become Fighting France. She added,

Some months ago I told you that you could count on the completion of my novel by the spring of 1916 [the never-completed novel Literature]; but I thought then that the war...