Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction

Based on extensive new archival research, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond

Fiction offers the first study of Wharton’s full engagement with original writing in

genres outside those with which she has been most closely identified. So much

more than an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Wharton is reconsidered

in this book as a controversial playwright, a gifted poet, a trailblazing travel

writer, an innovative and subversive critic, a hugely influential design writer, and

an author who overturned the conventions of autobiographical form. Her

versatility across genres did not represent brief sidesteps, temporary diversions

from what has long been read as her primary role as novelist. Each was pursued

fully and whole-heartedly, speaking to Wharton’s very sense of herself as an

artist and her connected vision of artistry and art. The stories of these other Edith

Whartons, born through her extraordinary dexterity across a wide range of

genres, and their impact on our understanding of her career, are the focus of this

new study, revealing a bolder, more diverse, subversive and radical writer than

has long been supposed.

Laura Rattray is Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow,

Scotland, and Director of its Centre for American Studies. Her work on Wharton

includes, as editor, Edith Wharton in Context (2012), The Unpublished Writings of

Edith Wharton (2009), Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (2010), Summer

(2015) and, with Jennifer Haytock, The New Edith Wharton Studies (2019).