“... who they might never be. There’s often a carry-over from one generation to the next, as when Edith, in Hotel du Lac (1984), notices that ‘my mother’s fantasies, which remained unchanged all her life, taught me about reality.’Some of Brookner’s fiction bulges with the art historian’s need to expatiate on form and philosophy, but it is in ...”

“... to an entire suburb. Like others of their class and time, including their friends Henry James and Edith Wharton, the Boits travelled back and forth across the Atlantic and took up residence in France and Italy at various periods, as well as in Boston and Newport. Sometime in the late 1870s, Ned Boit, as he was always known, met Sargent in Paris, either ...”

“... greater if less direct, he promoted women writers (Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton), African-Americans (Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar) and immigrants (Abraham Cahan). He also introduced US readers to foreign literature. British literature was already widely read in the cheap reprints that proliferated before the ...”

“... From the Holy Mountain instead and, if you want to know what Gibran’s Boston looked like, try Edith Wharton.)Waterfield writes defensively: ‘The Prophet has often been criticised as platitudinous, over-saturated and trite. These are the arrogant criticisms of élitist and hard-hearted intellectuals.’ Hard-hearted and arrogant then, I find ...”

“... can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their biography, thirty years ago, but it is not true any more. Nor is it ...”

“... a better place to show the pictures: the dim, stately rooms still have the crepuscular feel of an Edith Wharton setting, and the fashionable women in the paintings look like the fashionable women who once came to the Fricks for the evening and, even better, like the fashionable women right outside on the streets of the Upper East Side. Hung high in the ...”

“... her by describing her bookshelves: To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her 21st birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of ...”

“... colony – the Berensons, the Actons, Janet Ross, Vernon Lee, with their house-guests such as Edith Wharton and Percy Lubbock – that Iris spent her girlhood. It was a society with a raging appetite for gossip, and before long Sybil had become almost their favourite subject: her dazzling wardrobe, her hypochondria, her high-pitched chatter and ...”

“... plus readings by well-known authors, meetings of over a hundred allied organisations such as the Edith Wharton Society (a Salman Rushdie Society had its formative meeting), a book exhibit, business meetings, and the annual job market. As usual, some flamboyantly-titled papers attracted the press, but after several years in which the MLA came under ...”

“... novelist of manners, Claire Messud writes in the tradition of Jane Austen, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Her first novel, When the World Was Steady, even nods to Austen through one of its plots, which involves a vicar and a spinster; its other plot, however, recounts the adventures of an Australian divorcée among the expatriates of Bali: the ...”

“... of the best ghost stories were written by women (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Edith Nesbit and Edith Wharton all made notable contributions to the tradition), and they often depicted extremes of female experience. The phantoms in these stories carried warnings, admonitions or silent appeals for ...”

“... about reaching above one’s station and being thereby exposed to ridicule that Jane Austen and Edith Wharton would explore in their female characters. In Leipzig the sumptuary legislators seem to have given up, realising that the law could never catch up with the fashion: ‘what people wear changes almost every year among the German Nation, and from ...”

“... Mr Carlyle . . . What a dreadful little bore and busy-body!’ This was unnecessarily vicious. Edith Wharton and the redoubtable composer Ethel Smyth both admired Lee and relished her sharp but risky wit. (Sir Frederick Leighton was described to friends as a cross between a Greek god and a head waiter.) H.G. Wells, ‘one of the greatest and dearest ...”

“... influences and circumscriptions as relentless and inescapable as anything Theodore Dreiser or Edith Wharton might have imagined.’ Henry James would have had no time for a character like Mabel; and Cassavetes gives us nothing like the picture of a society that we find in Dreiser or Wharton. Carney comes from a ...”

“... new masters. From Proust he learned to let a story extend slowly over long stretches of time. From Edith Wharton, that a ‘good way to write a book is to define a character by what he or she wants’ – something that hadn’t occurred to him before. His sentences became less crowded and he cut down on the puns. The Corrections (2001) and Freedom ...”