Fast and Loose: And the Buccaneers - Softcover

Wharton, Edith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813914833 ISBN 13: 9780813914831

Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr, 1993

Synopsis

With an Edith Wharton revival well under way, Fast and Loose, a romantic first novel begun when Wharton was fourteen and The Buccaneers, left unfinished when she died at seventy-five, are now back in print and available for the first time in one edition. The rich parallels seen when the two novels are presented together, along with Viola Hopkins Winner's critical Introduction, make this volume far greated than the sum of its parts.

About this title

About the Author

Viola Hopkins Winner, an editor of The Letters of Henry Adams, has written widely on American literature.

From Publishers Weekly

As the alpha and omega of a brilliant literary career, the two works gathered here are of interest chiefly to scholars. Fast and Loose , Wharton's first full-length work, was composed in 1876-77 when she was only 14, and, although its thematic concern with social standing and individual happiness anticipates the novels of her maturity, its plotting and characterization clearly reveal the hand of a juvenile. The boldest and most original section, in fact, is outside the work itself. Her own harshest (and truest) critic, Wharton appended three "reviews," one of which reads: "Is not the author very, very like a sick-sentimental school-girl who has begun her work with a fierce and bloody resolve to make it as bad as certain popular fiction & has ended with a blush, & a general erasure of all the naughty words which her modest vocabulary could furnish?" By contrast, The Buccaneers , left unfinished at Wharton's death in 1937, manifests a consummate artistry. (See Fiction Forecasts, June 28, for a review of Viking's Buccaneers as completed by Marion Mainwaring.) Included here is a facsimile of the version published by Wharton's literary executor in 1938; although Winner's textual notes are purely academic (e.g., "That Eglinton girl had" in one manuscript reads as "That Eglinton girl there" in another), her edition valiantly preserves the manuscript as a work-in-progress. Winner edited The Letters of Henry Adams.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Virginia Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0813914833
• ISBN 13: 9780813914831
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 514
• Editor: Winner Viola Hopkins