Edith Wharton was not only the author of novels and short stories but also of drama, poetry, autobiography, interior decoration, and travel writing. This study focuses on Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how a network of allusions to travel writing and art history books influenced Wharton’s representations of architectural and natural spaces. The book demonstrates Wharton’s complex relationship to works of art historians (John Ruskin, Émile Mâle, Arthur C. Porter) and travel authors (Wolfgang Goethe, Henry Adams, Henry James) in the trajectory of her travel writing. Kovács surveys how the acknowledgment of Wharton’s sources sheds light both on the author’s model of aesthetic understanding and scenic architectural descriptions, and how the shock of the Great War changed Wharton’s travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of things past. Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture provide a new key to her travel writings.

Rather than rarities, literary depictions of women breastfeeding infants are more common in American literature than recognized. In some cases, readers have dismissed such portrayals as scenic background or strokes of verisimilitude. In other cases, we have failed to register them at all. By cataloging and closely reading scenes of characters breastfeeding across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, this book decodes the beliefs of writers as celebrated as Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich and as current as Camille Dungy, Maggie Nelson, and Torrey Peters. It traces in these authors’ fantasies and fears the consistent and sometimes competing cultural ideologies that accrue over decades and find expression in breastfeeding scenes. Despite the different historical and cultural expectations of what a mother should be and do, twentieth and twenty-first-century women writers have consistently singled out maternal pleasure—a mother’s privileging of her own desire—as the most important theme attending scenes of breastfeeding.

This book explores the intricate interplay between physical spaces and psychological landscapes in the works of Irish-American author Maeve Brennan. Brennan’s writing is now classed amongst the most important of twentieth-century Irish women’s fiction, having undergone a significant reclamation and reappraisal in the 30 years since her death. Single and childfree for most of her life, Brennan eschewed the securities of family and home, experiencing an "otherness" that she shared with her fellow New Yorkers, many of them left, she wrote, hanging on to a city half-capsized––“most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life’s predicament.” It is a suitably ambiguous expression for a writer who cultivated an interstitial existence, whose stories inhere within a dream cycle of reiterative pasts, and whose works augment and elevate the canon of radical Irish fiction.

Barbara Bray (1924-2010) was an English woman of letters who translated some hundred novels, plays, and essays from French to English and was Marguerite Duras’s preferred translator. She also collaborated with some of the most prestigious directors and playwrights of the 20th century – Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Losey, and Franco Zeffirelli – helping them write screenplays and radioplays. This literary biography (re)evaluates in a textual, sociological, and historical perspective the social role of an English writer and translator in the history of ideas and contemporary art. Highlighting Bray’s influence in cultural transfers of ideas and literatures between France, Great Britain, and the United States, it renders visible the yet unrecognised work of a female mediator and creator. It nourishes the debate about women’s public voice and the representation of women in the media industries and contributes to enrich the ‘other’ history that is being currently written by feminist scholars around the world.

These carefully chosen selections from Edith Wharton's travel writing convey the writer's control of her craft. Wharton disliked the generality of guidebooks and focused instead on the "parentheses of travel"--the undiscovered hidden corners of Europe, Morocco, and the Mediterranean. Included is an excerpt from Wharton's unpublished memoir, The Cruise of Vanadis, as well as front line depictions of Lorraine and the Vosges during World War I. Photos.

In the early years of the 20th Century, Edith Wharton took the road trip of a lifetime across France with the celebrated author, Henry James (author of ‘Turn of the Screw,’ later adapted for TV, featuring ‘Downton Abbey’ star Michelle Dockery). Accompanied by Edith’s husband, their chauffeur, and Wharton's two dogs, they travelled the French countryside, stopping wherever inspiration struck. The result, ‘A Motor-Flight Through France,’ is a chronicle of the French villages, towns, and cities they visited. Wharton, with an innate appreciation for architecture, perfectly captures the beauty of turn-of-the-century France, detailing their stop-offs with evocative descriptions. From the food, they ate to the people they met, ‘A Motor-Flight Through France’ is an important chronicle of the country at a time when Italy was setting its military sites on it. A superb read for Wharton fans, and those with an interest in history and travel. Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) was an American designer and novelist. Born in an era when the highest ambition a woman could aspire to was a good marriage, Wharton went on to become one of America’s most celebrated authors. During her career, she wrote over 40 books, using her wealthy upbringing to bring authenticity and detail to stories about the upper classes and she went on to become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, for her novel 'The Age of Innocence'. She moved to France in 1923, where she continued to write until her death. Her works have been adapted to the screen countless times. The most recent examples are Martin Scorsese's 'The Age of Innocence' (1993) starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder and Terence Davies' 'The House of Mirth' (2000) starring Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz.

Edith Wharton has recently returned to prominence as a major American novelist. But few have taken her architectural work as seriously as she herself took it, or noticed its effects on her career. Two early architectural books and three travel works give sustained critical attention to the built environment. Early novels graphically portray the physical miseries of the poor and marginalized and their course in hierarchies of class and gender. By contrast, her letters consistently celebrate the tastes and manners of the elite. At its best, her fiction embodies this tension - the beauty and grace of elegant houses and public spaces, juxtaposed to their effects on those under their control. This book tracks Wharton's literary and architectural work in tandem, revealing their complex relationship. It also foregrounds the odd symmetry of her career, which began and ended in fierce attachment to traditional values, moved from delight in Italy to despair for France, and centered on the brilliantly crafted structures and spaces of the prewar novels. Annette Larson Benert is Associate Professor of English at DeSales University.

Various authors focus on life and works of Edith Wharton, on her women in fashion, in history, out of time, addiction and intimacy, travel, and modernity, art, the age of film. The book contains an illustrated chronology and a bibliographical essay.

Shedding the turn-of-the-century social confines she felt existed for women in America, Edith Wharton set out in the newly invented "motor-car" to explore the cities and countryside of France. In A Motor-Flight Through France, originally published in 1908, Wharton combines the power of her prose, her love for travel, and her affinity for France to produce this compelling travelogue.

From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton's own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.