Editor's Note

Abstract

This issue of the Edith Wharton Review is my last as editor, so I wish to recognize the work and collegiality of the journal's associate editors Myrto Drizou, Shannon Brennan, and Sharon Kim. Due to their scholarly acumen and commitment to the EWR, the journal has continued to publish innovative work on Wharton and her circle and expanded its readership. I am grateful to the members of the remarkable brain trust that is the EWR editorial board for their support and guidance.I have the pleasure of announcing that beginning with issue 37.2 Rita Bode will be the new editor. Rita is professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her main area of research is in nineteenth- and early twentieth- century North American and British literature with a special interest in transnational studies as seen in her chapter, “'My beloved Romola,'” in Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism, edited by Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando (UP of Florida, 2015). She is also a contributor to Ferdâ Asya's Teaching Edith Wharton's Major Novels and Short Fiction with a project she undertook with Sirpa Salenius (University of Eastern Finland): “Students Abroad – In the Classroom: A Transatlantic Assignment on Edith Wharton's “Roman Fever” and is part of Oxford University Press's The Complete Works of Edith Wharton (general editor, Carol Singley), responsible for Volume 7, The Novellas. She has co-edited two volumes of essays on Canadian author, L. M. Montgomery: L. M. Montgomery's Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911–42 (MQUP [McGill-Queen's UP], 2015), with Lesley D. Clement, and L. M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature(s) (MQUP, 2018), with anthropologist Jean Mitchell. The latter work was awarded ACQL's (Association of Canadian and Québec Literatures) 2018 Gabrielle Roy Prize (English) for the best book-length study in Canadian and Québec literary criticism. She recently co-edited, with Monika Elbert, American Women's Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic (Palgrave, 2021). Other publications include work on George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, among others. We are fortunate to have Rita as our new editor.First in this issue is Mary Carney's “Improvised Chase: Notes on Wharton Studies,” a bibliographical article that “provides an overview of significant events, archival findings, major books, and select journal articles” in Wharton studies published since the 2014 thirtieth anniversary issue of the EWR. The article promises to be an important resource for anyone interested in recent Wharton scholarship. Next is Emily J. Orlando's “Edith Wharton and the Architect: The Olney-Beecher version of ‘The Keys of Heaven.’” This archival article remedies the fact that “the only scholarly attention paid to the two abandoned Wharton novels called ‘The Keys of Heaven’ has focused on the ‘Praslin version,’ a retelling of a murder-suicide from 1840s Paris.” Orlando finds that the Olney-Beecher version depicts previously undocumented aspects of Wharton's relationship with Ogden Codman, with whom she worked on The Decoration of Houses (1897). The third article is Emma Aylor's “‘Nay, rather Lord, between’: The Unification of Body and Spirit in Wharton's Deathbed Dramatic Monologues,” which won the 2021 Elsa Nettels Prize for a Beginning Scholar. The article examines “The Leper's Funeral and Death,” unpublished in Wharton's lifetime, and “Margaret of Cortona,” published in 1901. In her analysis of these poems, Aylor argues that Wharton “draws attention to the simultaneous fragility and persistence of the human: between and beyond traditional Christian divisions of body and soul.” Following the article is a roundtable review of Arielle Zibrak's engaging consideration in Guilty Pleasures of “the specifically pleasurable forms of feminine guilt and desire stimulated by supposedly ‘lowbrow’ aesthetic tendencies.” This is followed by reviews of three other notable books: Melanie V. Dawson's Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age, Laura Rattray's Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, and Emily Coit's American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition.