Edith Wharton and Genre

‘In Rattray’s hands, Edith Wharton is re-presented as a writer mastering a wide

range of genres beyond the celebrated fiction. Wharton’s achievements in

poetry, drama, architecture and design, criticism, memoir, and travel writing

emerge as sites for her most confident, radical experiments. This game-changing

book will lay to rest the image of the grand dame, showing Wharton to defy

categorization and to be as “large” and full of “multitudes” as the Whitman she

so admired.’

— Emily J. Orlando, Professor of English at Fairfield University, USA,

and author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (2007)

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.