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“... these scenes a mocking voice-over – the voice is Joanne Woodward’s – reads some of Edith Wharton’s funniest lines (‘Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it’), which complicate and perturb the meaning of these already complicated and perturbing images. Nothing, it seems, is to escape the ...”

“... with his style, which was equally, in a sense, rootless. Consider this sentence from a letter to Edith Wharton (2 January 1908): ‘I have passed here a very solitary and casanier Christmas-tide (of wondrous still and frosty days, and nights of huge silver stars), and yesterday finished a job of the last urgency for which this intense concentration had ...”

“... in Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse (1988); and Lyall Powers in Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 (1990). There’s a terrific load of information and perception that was untapped by Matthiessen in this recent shelf-ful, on top of all that’s in the Colossal edifice; and besides, Lewis, as one of the new set of literary ...”

“... girl, launching herself on society with only her wits and her dress sense comes straight from Edith Wharton. The helpless, boneheaded, inarticulate Englishman, whose life is both redeemed and ruined by a single quixotic fixation, recurs again and again in the plots of Henry James. Events and situations continually arose which seem to cry out for ...”

“... brother, moving ‘in a cloud of fine discretions and hesitations and precautions’. She disliked Edith Wharton ‘thoroughly – and morbidly’, as Edel put it, and this meant that Wharton or anyone else deemed disreputable could not be involved in any aspect of the estate. Miss Bosanquet, James’s highly ...”

“... neglect, ‘did some good’, and acknowledges that R.W.B. Lewis’s extraordinary biography of Edith Wharton, the first to take her seriously as a major writer, ‘remains a good book’, her readings of male biographers and critics are generally harsh. She minimises the impact of discreditable information in biographies of men, arguing that ‘only ...”

“... which the mahout would sit. Lots of pretty things that might be described as ‘cunning’ by an Edith Wharton character. A little box in the shape of a piano, a cigar cutter in the shape of a fish, a match striker in the shape of a toad, a tiny pink Cinderella carriage with rock crystal windows, gold-stemmed chrysanthemums, a powder puff in the shape ...”

“... money. In that ambition she seems to have been mostly successful. James, Rodin, Thomas Beecham, Edith Wharton, Sargent were among her many fans and beneficiaries. In August 1911, James wrote to Alice, his sister-in-law, and explained why he was at Hunter’s house. ‘I am adding day to day here, as you see – partly because it helps to tide me over a ...”

“... knocked his socks off. We trudge through acres of Balzac, Dickens and, forgive the impropriety, Edith Wharton; but the problem is crystallised in Jane Austen. She gives her admirers little frissons with her guineas and annuities: such insight into the economic prisons of her heroines! In reality, Jane Austen frames her stories with precise sums of ...”

“... James took the figurative mode to greater heights: ‘My hands are dripping with blood,’ he told Edith Wharton. ‘All the way from Chelsea to Grosvenor Place I have been bayoneting, my dear Edith, and hurling bombs and ravishing and raping.’ Only George Santayana kept his head, neither underestimating the ...”

“... enough, Wilson may have made a good guess right at the beginning, when he wrote his ‘Homage to Edith Wharton’ (who died in 1937); certainly, as Brightman says, there is ‘something eerie’ in Wilson’s account of how Wharton ‘began writing serious fiction during the period of a nervous breakdown, in the midst ...”

“... a bastion of pan-European culture which had proved devastatingly permeable. Beyond Britain, Edith Wharton used the same image when she described a ‘final trumpet’ sounding through Paris: ‘we shall never summer in that house again.’ The question this generation of writers laboured to answer was what to do with apocalypse: how was it to be ...”

“... separated from his formation somehow and never made it back. Teddy Roosevelt wrote to his friend Edith Wharton: There is no use of my writing about Quentin; for I should break down if I tried. His death is heartbreaking. But it would have been far worse if he had lived at the cost of the slightest failure to perform his duty. In the autumn as the war ...”

“... In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting horizon of expectations and disappointments. Only in retrospect do we understand that it has unobtrusively shaped a ...”

“... the more so now that we know that not only Pierre Louÿs and Swinburne but women as different as Edith Wharton and Anais Nin wrote – what? Wharton: erotica? Nin: pornography? (Hers, like the French police official’s, was ‘bespoke’.) Some day an alert or lucky explorer of erotica will identify the ‘scrofulous ...”