There has been an explosion of research on Edith Wharton in the past five years that seeks to position the author in new, vibrant ways. These include her connections with modernism, World War I, climate change, queer theory, cosmopolitanism, and autobiography. While Oxford University Press has commissioned a thirty-volume work on the author, with Carol Singley as general editor, scholars this past year have produced three monographs on Wharton: Melanie Dawson's Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age (2020), Sheila Liming's What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books (2020), and Laura Rattray's Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction (2020). Rattray is a crucial figure in recent scholarly output on Wharton and has already edited several collections on Wharton: The New Edith Wharton Studies (2019), edited with Jennifer Haytock; Edith Wharton in Context (2012); Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country: A Reassessment (2010); and The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (2009). Her 2020 monograph, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction, is a groundbreaking work that focuses thoroughly and squarely on all of Wharton's output in the genres outside the novels and short stories for which she is so famous.Laura Rattray evinces Edith Wharton's career-long engagement in many different genres, “beyond [the] fiction” she was known and lauded for. In her powerful, wide-ranging introduction, Rattray contends that a full third of Edith Wharton's oeuvre lay outside fiction, and that it is “these other Edith Whartons” where the writer is at her boldest and most subversive (2). For this very reason, Rattray argues, scholarly attention to her work in these other genres has been largely overlooked.Rattray's book fascinates with its deft prose and its exhaustive research, bringing to light previously unknown poems, plays, and letters. The citation of archival material is thorough, detailed, and allows the reader to appreciate the enormous amount of material that exists in the archives, as well as the vast amount of primary and secondary material that Rattray has studied. Each encyclopedic body chapter is devoted to a particular genre and charts the entirety of Wharton's career in it. In a stylistic demonstration of her argument, Rattray brilliantly uses Wharton's fiction to contextualize her other writings, often opening her chapters with references to Wharton's novels before discussing the generic form at hand. With this reversal of hierarchies, she invites readers to reconsider not only Wharton's work but also, by extension, their own scholarly approach toward other writers' work.Chapter 2 (the first body chapter) examines Wharton's writing in poetry, showing that many of the themes Wharton would address in her fiction were already embedded in her poems. Although Wharton was engaged with the genre throughout her life, from the privately printed Verses (1875) to her Twelve Poems (1926), she never earned a reputation as a poet. Rattray documents a young Wharton's concern with form in her letters to her governess, Anna Bahlmann, before taking readers through the tour de force of this chapter—the “archival prize jewel” of an unpublished notebook in Indiana's Lilly Library containing fifty-eight original poems (27). Rattray's exciting close readings grant scholars access to these new poems, showing their inspiration in Italian settings or their thematic concerns with death, painful relationships, and social injustice. She concludes that “[Wharton's] poetry can be dull and predictable, but also subversive, blasphemous, feminist, transgressive—and deeply unsettling” (48). For example, the dramatic monologue “Margaret of Cortana” (1901) portrays a nun who confesses her preference for human over divine love and provoked outrage from Catholic press, and “The Last Giustiniani” (1889) critiques the male gaze that objectifies a woman as “an uncorrupted vessel to reproduce for a patrician caste” (35).While recent publications like Irene Goldman-Price's Selected Poems of Edith Wharton (2019) indicate a rising critical interest in Wharton's poetry, few scholars have attended to her work as a playwright. The third and most captivating chapter of Rattray's book focuses on Wharton's plays, remarkably arguing that “at the turn of the century, Wharton's work was focused more on achieving success as a playwright than as a novelist” (57). Rattray insists that scholarship no longer relegate Wharton's playwrighting to a footnote, and indeed, she is elsewhere responsible for recovering Wharton's plays. She published three of Wharton's unfinished plays in The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (2009), and The Shadow of a Doubt in 2016, the first complete Wharton play known to scholars. In this book, Rattray illustrates how Wharton's plays often become the source material for later novels: for example, The Shadow of a Doubt, with its controversial theme of euthanasia, predates the themes seen in The House of Mirth (1905) and The Fruit of the Tree (1907). Through archival research, Rattray charts Wharton's foiled attempts to realize her plays on stage: productions were canceled because of marketplace pressures and frustrating collaborations with producers and actors. Rattray also shows that Edith Wharton was working in different types of drama throughout her life—including melodrama and, surprisingly, comedy. Of Wharton's manuscript The Man of Genius she writes, “it is easy to forget that this is a writer who also has first-rate comedic skills, and an Oscar Wildean tonality permeates the dialogue” (63). Rattray sees Wharton's play manuscripts as key manifestations of Wharton's radicalism: an unmarried, pregnant servant in Untitled; divorce and its gendered double standards in The Arch.; and both the euthanasia theme of The Shadow of a Doubt and its protagonist's “quiet feminism,” which is at odds with histrionic conventions of melodrama (65).Chapters 4–7 survey Edith Wharton's nonfiction writings—travel writings, architectural works, literary criticism, and life writings. In chapter 4, Rattray argues that Wharton's travel writings are subversive because they explore spaces beyond the typically set itineraries. Italian Backgrounds (1905) promotes a unique, individualistic spirit because it tells readers to take journeys of their own, to explore the “background” as well as the foreground, and educates readers beyond appreciating solely Italian Renaissance art. Rattray suggests that this objective aligns Wharton with an American narrative of individualism. Interestingly, Rattray positions Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915) as a travel book, not a war text, pairing it with French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). Rattray debunks the idea that Wharton was anti-American in these works: “her travel writing, rather than underscoring a new identity, compellingly realigns her with the country of her birth” (110). Throughout this chapter, Rattray asserts that Wharton's travel writing and Italian Backgrounds in particular is “at times boldly modernist” (115) or “a modernist treatise” (92), a point that warrants further explanation. To be sure, Wharton may be going against prescribed forms, but it is not clear how Wharton's “following lesser-known tracks” and “different ways of looking” in itself makes her a “modernist” (115). More explanation of this term could better engage this volume with other recent conversations about Wharton and modernism, such as Lisa Tyler's edited volume Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism (2019), for which Rattray herself wrote the foreword.Of all of Wharton's nonfiction writing, her works on architecture and design have garnered the most critical attention. In the fifth chapter of her book, Rattray addresses The Decoration of Houses with Ogden Codman (1897) and Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904). The former was a commercial success, as interests in interior design were flourishing, and cast Wharton as “one of the few women making a mark in the field” (126). Wharton's widely esteemed volume uniquely connected architecture to interior design. Rattray argues that Wharton is not being elitist in this text, despite its advice about upper-class rooms like private libraries, but instead democratizes elite notions of taste to all. In her compelling analysis of Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), Rattray displays the intellectual rigor of the volume, for which Wharton visited over eighty villas. Further, Rattray exposes the sexism of editorial responses and Wharton's resistance to them. Wharton's book was criticized for being too dry and academic when editors and reviewers preferred levity, but Wharton would not alter her tone; and although Wharton fought to have the architectural plans included in the final volume, they were cut, an omission later critiqued by reviewers. Rattray concludes that like her travel writing, Wharton's writings on architecture “offer an undaunted extolment of culture, of a rich, meaningful, connected life” (141), and importantly position her as a woman seeking to make her critical voice heard.In chapter 6, Rattray notes the contradiction between the 1920s marking the height of Wharton's literary acclaim (the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, an honorary doctorate from Yale) and her being cast as outdated by a younger generation of modernist writers. Rattray reclaims the importance of Wharton's 1925 The Writing of Fiction, still largely ignored by scholars, and argues that sexism and ageism are responsible for dismissing this work at the height of Wharton's professional success. The Writing of Fiction was criticized as inferior to Percy Lubbock's 1921 The Craft of Fiction and diminished as a “little study” by reviewers (167). Rattray disputes the claim that Wharton was anti-modernist and reminds readers that many of the canonical works of modernism, such as Mrs. Dalloway and The Great Gatsby, appeared late in 1925, after Wharton's The Writing of Fiction. In fact, Rattray claims, The Writing of Fiction is in dialogue with modernism, but Wharton favors literary continuity over mere fashionability. Thus, Wharton argues that stream of consciousness technique is not original but instead “a re-emergence of tranche de vie” used by early French realists (160). For Rattray, The Writing of Fiction is uniquely pro-writer. Wharton supports the writer's flexibility within structures of form and bemoans market pressures that force writers to produce new work without allowing time for artistic reflection or growth. Rattray's analysis valorizes Wharton's critical vision as “open and flexible, not incoherent or inchoate,” and persuades scholars to revisit these works after years of critical obscurity (174).The final body chapter, titled “Life Writings,” explores Edith Wharton's motivation to write autobiography, notably A Backward Glance (1934), as a preemptive step against biographers. Given her unfavorable exposure in gossip sheets like Town Topics, Edith Wharton sought to forestall inaccuracies by telling her own life story. Wharton courts the popularity of autobiography in the 1930s, but with a decidedly singular approach. A Backward Glance offers none of the sensational details seen in other autobiographies—there are no references to Wharton's affair with Morton Fullerton—and instead invites readers into Wharton's elite circle and into her “adventures with books” as the key moments of a life (191). As Rattray argues in her chapters on travel writing and literary criticism, she here too stresses Wharton's “flexibility” and her confidently “taking [her] own path” in the genre (191). As in her travel writing, Wharton's aim in her life writings is to “present herself as an American for the age: cultured, part of an elite club, connected to Europe, but with a distinctive US lineage” (194). Wharton includes images of her great-grandfather's portraits in the Capitol Rotunda and charts her ancestry from Europe, but these alone do not seem to sustain Rattray's bold claim that “A Backward Glance offers a national document for its US readership and a cultural map of immigration” (193–94). On the other hand, Rattray deftly shows how Wharton's self-presentation in A Backward Glance, as well as her other life writings, contradicts letters uncovered in the archives; such inconsistencies betray Wharton's life writings as a construction of events rather than a factual record.Overall, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction is an outstanding contribution to Wharton studies, motivating further study of Wharton's work in these genres, and influencing Wharton's inclusion in each of the treated genres alongside other practitioners at the turn of the twentieth century. Throughout her book, Rattray challenges several (mis)perceptions of Edith Wharton: (1) as the staid grande dame who was increasingly out of touch, when in fact her writing explored controversial themes; (2) as anti-woman, when her asserting herself in a male-dominated world is in fact feminist; (3) as un-American, showing rather how her vision of American includes an appreciation for European culture and is not limited to place; and (4) as elitist, when much of her work sought to democratize ideas on design, writing, and culture. In her afterword, Rattray concludes that Wharton's work in each of the genres, beyond her famed reputation as a novelist, was “pursued fully and whole-heartedly and spoke to Wharton's sense of herself as an artist and her connected vision of art and artistry” (213). Rattray's claim that Wharton is “radical” and “subversive” is clearest in the chapters on poetry and playwriting because the poems and plays address controversial topics. Throughout her book, Rattray successfully shows how Wharton is flexible in her approach to genre, and how it is not easy to pigeonhole her. However, how this flexibility in turns becomes radical, subversive, or modernist sometimes needs more explanation; at times it seems Rattray folds the context of Wharton's radicalism as a woman asserting her territory into the radical content of her writing.This groundbreaking volume proves that Wharton's work in “other” genres merits serious scholarly attention and disseminates a rich body of archival material to scholars. The vast quantity of research in each chapter, both primary and secondary, makes this volume an authoritative tool for anyone seeking to build on Rattray's foundation and explore Wharton's work in the genres beyond fiction. The next step may be to pursue Wharton's connection to the many historical contexts she occupied within any of these genres in her long career. Laura Rattray's Edith Wharton: Beyond Fiction is a crucial intervention in the ongoing renaissance in Wharton criticism.