Dear Edith Wharton Society members,
As we look forward to 2021, the leadership of the Society will transition to a group of incoming officers. At this time, we are accepting nominations for the position of Secretary and two Members-at-Large, for the 2021-23 term. Please see below descriptions of these positions according to our Constitution:
Secretary
“5.4. The Secretary shall take and distribute minutes of all meetings of the Society and of the Executive Board and shall forward minutes to the Web Master for posting on the society’s web page. The Secretary shall coordinate the nominations of new members of the board.”
5.7 “To achieve continuity, officers shall ordinarily succeed one another in this order: the Vice-President shall become President, and the Secretary become Vice-President, and the President become the Immediate Past President.”
Member-at-Large
Members-at-Large may be asked to adjudicate the EWS prizes, and they have the option of organizing, or deputizing someone to organize, the guaranteed EWS panel at NEMLA, SAMLA, and other regional MLA conferences (5.9).
For further information about these positions, please review our Constitution at
https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/membership/constitution-and-by-laws/.
If you have any questions about either position, please feel free to contact any current Society officer, including President Melanie Dawson (mvdaws@wm.edu), Vice President Jennifer Haytock (jhaytock@brockport.edu), or Secretary Myrto Drizou (myrto.drizou@boun.edu.tr) for further information.
Candidates must be members in good standing of the Edith Wharton Society. Membership dues can be paid here:
https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/membership/
Please email Myrto Drizou with nominations by Friday, July 31, 2020. Please include which position you are nominating yourself for and a one-paragraph biography. A voting period will follow the close of the nomination period.
To vote, you must be a member in good standing. I encourage you to check on your membership status (https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/membership/directory/) and update it if necessary. Please don’t hesitate to contact our membership coordinator Sheila Liming (sheila.liming@und.edu) with questions about your membership.
Sincerely,
Myrto
—
Myrto Drizou
Assistant Professor of English
Department of Western Languages and Literatures
Bogaziçi University
34342, Bebek
Istanbul, Turkey
Secretary, Edith Wharton Society
Associate Editor, Edith Wharton Review
In 1900, Edith Wharton burst into the settled summer colony of Lenox. An aspiring novelist in her thirties, she was already a ferocious aesthete and intellect. She and her husband, Teddy, planned a defiantly classical villa, and she became a bestselling author with The House of Mirth in 1905. As a hostess, designer, gardener and writer, Wharton set high standards that delighted many, including Ambassador Joseph Choate and sculptor Daniel Chester French. But her perceptive and sometimes indiscreet pen also alienated potent figures like Emily Vanderbilt Sloane and Georgiana Welles Sargent. Author Cornelia Brooke Gilder gives an insider’s glimpse of the community’s reaction to this disruptive star during her tumultuous Lenox decade.
I’m contacting you about my recently published novel, The Night of All Souls, a mystery about words from the past. In this novel, Edith Wharton is variously reimagined: as a host in the afterlife, a historical figure in a modern novella, and as an elusive presence in the pages of her own writing. Published by Penguin NZ, I’m hoping you will be interested to know more:
