There’s a new page at the site dedicated to the history of the Edith Wharton Society: https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/membership/about/ews-archives/
Carole Shaffer-Koros is the Edith Wharton Society Archivist. Materials such as conference programs, etc., will be added.
This will supplement the basic history of the EWS here:
Minutes from the MLA 2020 EWS Board Meeting are available under Membership – EWS Business and here:
https://wordpress.com/page/edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/6590
From Mary Chinery via the wharton-l listserv:
Wharton scholars might be interested in newly available digitized archival materials in Princeton University’s Firestone Library. A significant trove of Wharton letters and other manuscripts and business papers have been posted online. Individual pages can be downloaded as .tiffs or the entire file as a .pdf (which requires less computer space). Happy Reading!
Here’s a link to the results from a general search in Finding Aids site for Edith Wharton. Click online materials on the left.
See you in New York!
Mary Chinery, Georgian Court University
Happy 158th birthday to Edith Wharton!
Edith Wharton kept restlessly editing her best sellers even through numerous print runs. In 1921, she finished fine tuning “The Age of Innocence” upon its sixth printing and tucked one edition onto the shelves at her chateau in Southeastern France.
That copy, with her signature and bookplate, has resurfaced in time for the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It has been donated to the library at another of her palatial homes, the Mount, a museum in Lenox, Mass.
This is the only known English-language version of “The Age of Innocence” that belonged to Wharton, said Susan Wissler, executive director of the museum. (Examples of the writer’s copies of many of her works are already at the Mount; gaps include her collected teenage poems.) Ms. Wissler added that the museum’s book collection, as it grows, powerfully evokes Wharton’s interests and presence: “The library very much provides us with her soul.”
Photo courtesy Wikimedia.
“She was bad . . . always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
–Edith Wharton, New Year’s Day, 1924
As of today, January 1, 2020, Wharton’s quartet of novellas Old New York is in the public domain. To celebrate this, here’s New Year’s Day (the Seventies), courtesy of Project Gutenberg Australia.
Here are PG Australia’s texts of the novellas:
The Spark, False Dawn, New Year’s Day, The Old Maid
Links to the other novels and novellas available online are being updated today and are available here: https://edithwhartonsociety.wordpress.com/works/novels-and-novellas/
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(The ‘Seventies)
I
“She was BAD…always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue
Hotel,” said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the
guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing. Her spectacles
slanted on her knitting, she dropped the words in a hiss that might
have singed the snowy baby-blanket which engaged her indefatigable
fingers. (It was typical of my mother to be always employed in
benevolent actions while she uttered uncharitable words.)
[read the rest at the link]
Announcement of an Edith Wharton Opera
Composer Paul Scherer and librettist Germaine Shames have just completed studio recordings of IN VENICE: an Opera About the Pursuit of Love and Inspiration (not necessarily in that order), which is an adaptation of two of Wharton’s works, “The Muse’s Tragedy” and “The Touchstone.” Together, these early works form a 90-minute two-act chamber opera.
The opera follows the experiences of a young biographer of a renowned poet, who chances upon the poet’s much talked-about Muse during a sojourn in Venice. They spend a week together—ostensibly, to collaborate on a volume of verse. Instead, romance blossoms. Ten years later, the biographer returns to Venice with his young socialite wife, having sold his Muse’s love letters to pay for the honeymoon. Can a Muse inspire the most sublime sonnets in the history of poetry and yet not be loved?
Interested scholars are invited to contact Paul Scherer (schereradvisors@gmail.com) and/or Germaine Shames (germainewrites@gmail.com) for additional information. You may also visit the following sites:
*Facebook page for In Venice https://www.facebook.com/epicopera/.
*Website <http://germainewrites.com>*
*New Play Exchange <https://newplayexchange.org/users/2551/germaine-shames>*
*YouTube Channel <https://www.youtube.com/user/germainewrites>
