“... alive: he was briefly the most highly paid writer in America, valued by magazine editors alongside Edith Wharton. He’s now remembered for a handful of short stories and his ‘dog books’. As early as 1942, Kazin was writing that London seemed to be ‘slipping away even as a boy’s hero’. By 1953, he was the punchline of one of Nabokov’s ...”

“... to explain the gap between resistance to organised capital in the first Gilded Age – the age of Edith Wharton and J.P. Morgan – and acceptance of it in the second. Fraser provides a powerful historical explanation for the waning of American dissent. He discusses the mid-century incorporation of the labour movement but also dissects more recent ...”

“... to Grant Richards. Housman read Proust and James; he enjoyed Colette; he much admired the work of Edith Wharton. Mr Graves finds it surprising that he neglected the opportunity to cultivate the society of E.M. Forster: my guess would be that he did not think much more highly of Forster’s work than he did of Galsworthy’s. The only Lawrence he is ...”

“... York’. Whitman’s desire to embody the city is set against the closed world of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Conrad shows O’Henry and Stephen Crane plucking characters from the crowd; Jacob Riis using photography to document the inhumanities of slum tenements, Stieglitz using it to make skyscrapers monumental; Oldenburg embracing the city by making ...”

“... of furniture, all of it having been seized by creditors. ‘As in the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton,’ Barnes writes, ‘there was an evident and familiar solution: find an American heiress.’ Montesquiou came to the rescue, fixing Polignac up with Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune (‘It’s the union of the lyre and ...”

“... editor is American, and she is contributing to a series which gives the same treatment to Emerson, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Faulkner, Melville and so on. Eliot’s presence on this list amounts to a claim that Eliot is an American author, a decision qualified by a willingness to be fair to the disappointed British: ‘since Eliot’s work was ...”

“... tinkling, private, giggling, impression. As if I had gone in to a men’s urinal.’ Edith Wharton, a frequent guest at Qu’Acre, wouldn’t have liked that either. To the translator Gerard Hopkins, who stayed at Qu’Acre as a young man, the most striking thing was the provision of books in the lavatories. In a preface to Belchamber ...”

“... of a prejudice shared in varying degrees by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as an ...”

“... the mother, is ‘small-minded’ and ‘boring’; Alice, ‘seething with correct repression’; Edith Wharton, a ‘voyeur’. (Alice is treated more sympathetically once she is dying, perhaps because she then appears to feel more sympathetic to Woolson.) That Gordon is also willing to trash the men in James’s life – according to one of the ...”

“... took up her role as the family’s angel of death. Other managing women were swiftly sent packing: Edith Wharton, most notably, but also Henry’s loyal secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, whose decision to pass on a message from Wharton led to her virtual banishment from the flat. (Alice had long resented ...”

“... striking in her shortest stories: ‘Wants’, in which a woman at long last returns two Edith Wharton books to the library and pays her $32 fine, evokes a full span of debts and disappointments, hopes and habits, and the unaccountable passage of the years in not much more than two pages. It begins: ‘I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was ...”

“... the mother’s silly extramarital affair and consequent divorce. (They might be characters out of Edith Wharton.) The four sections of the novel are discontinuous in time and space: a childhood episode in Venice, remembered all his life by Flor’s stolid cousin Georgie; Flor’s breakdown following two years of marriage to Bob Harris, a Jewish American ...”

“... being inherited by a Van Rensselaer grandson, Walter Berry, remembered now as the consort of Edith Wharton. Some of the papers and books, taken to Paris, passed into the possession of a great-grandson of Augusta’s patron Stephen Van Renssalaer, mad Cousin Harry Crosby, the subject of Geoffrey Wolff’s Black Sun.) Why is Parker telling us all ...”

“... fights with bouncers and cabbies, drunken self-pity and bouts of remorse. Take his courtship of Edith Wharton, one of his literary heroes. At their first meeting, in 1920, he prostrated himself, kneeling ‘at her feet in a showy adulation’. Invited to lunch at Wharton’s French château, he ‘fortified his ...”

“... in the entrance hall. This is a progressive facility. I chose a nice copy of The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton from the shelves of the free library. Next time I come, I’ll bring something in exchange. The FOODTOGO refreshment cave featured a newspaper rack displaying a thick crop of the issue of the LRB in which Jonathan Meades claims it’s ...”