Editor's Note

Abstract

Edith Wharton's archive, distributed across more thirty institutions in North America and Europe, is receiving renewed attention from volume editors working on The Complete Works of Edith Wharton. Their examination of holograph manuscripts has produced significant discoveries, as seen in the first article in this issue, Jennifer Haytock's “Judith Wheater's Queer Vision: Edith Wharton's Alternative Title for The Children.” Archival discoveries have long redefined Wharton studies, as when Mary Chinery and Laura Rattray located the lost Wharton play The Shadow of a Doubt in 2017, substantially revising our understanding of her work in the genre. Haytock's discovery of an alternative title for The Children is the basis for her highly original assessment of the ways the novel interrogates “its society's reliance on and reproduction of inherited structures of family, gender, and age categories.”The second article in this issue is Emily Orlando's “‘One long vision of beauty’: Edith Wharton and Italian Visual Culture.” Due to Orlando's prior landmark work on the visual arts in Wharton's fiction and nonfiction, she is well positioned to argue that Wharton's command of Italian art and architecture and “great reverence for Italy … not only made possible her two studies of Italy [Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) and Italian Backgrounds (1905)] but also substantially informs the aesthetic of her early career.” Orlando describes Wharton's establishment of herself as “an accomplished artist and authority on aesthetics,” guiding the reader through the intellectual and travel experiences that formed Wharton's aesthetic outlook and the ways it changed as she matured. The article is particularly useful for its discussion of Wharton's early career in the context of individual works of art that she considered in her nonfiction, for in many cases she repurposed her extensive knowledge of art and architecture to create historical settings in her fiction and depict her characters' aesthetic responses to works of art she found emotionally moving. This essay will serve scholars interested in analyzing continuities between the books on Italy, The Decoration of Houses (1887), and Wharton's fiction to 1905.Lisa Tyler's “The Sins of the Fathers: Mental Illness, Heredity, and Short Fiction by Wharton and Hemingway” is the final article in this issue. Tyler, like Haytock, deals with families, examining Wharton's novella Sanctuary and Ernest Hemingway's “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” a story published decades after his death in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987). Tyler proceeds from the observation that “Wharton and Hemingway wrestled with bipolar disorder and its devastating symptoms in their own families and wrote stories in which they expressed their own personal anxieties and cultural anxieties about the illness's devastating impact.” Tyler examines depictions in both works of mental illness and its relation to heredity, eugenics, and degeneration theory. She finds commonalities in the ways Wharton and Hemingway used their knowledge of these subjects, studying how their respective views on eugenics interacted with the ways the “authors grapple with their own familial experience of inherited … mental illness.”For their assistance in preparing this issue, I wish to thank Associate Editor Sharon Kim, Associate Editor Myrto Drizou, Book Review Editor Shannon Brennan, Special Advisory Editor Dale Bauer, and the rest of the Editorial Board. The Edith Wharton Review welcomes articles on all aspects of Wharton, including work on her relation to other writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wharton's archive, Wharton and periodical culture, the author's social networks, and her nonfiction writing.