A late starter perhaps, but not a slow learner: when Wharton sent a copy of that first collection to her friend Paul Bourget , whom she had met in at the beginning of his eight-month tour of the United States, Bourget noted in his diary:.
Reading Edith W. Admired, concerning this book, what patience can achieve. I remember Edith W. What progress in these six years through hard work and strength of will. I am convinced that the life of the artist is to be found entirely in this power of composition. Looked at differently, in the years between and Wharton was undergoing a radical transformation: it would have been surprising had she not suffered from depression.
The short stories, which she would continue to write prolifically almost until the moment of her death in , are evidence of the energy Wharton spent reinventing herself as an artist. This Wharton-of-the-old-guard has remained, since Lewis at least, a recurring figure in the criticism of the short fiction.
Finally, he acknowledges the element of surprise in her inclusion of the eerie in her discussion of the short story.
Rules, in other words, are meant to be broken, and Edith Wharton did not think of herself as ordained to eschew the new anymore than she saw herself as bound by tradition. Or, to put it differently, has what was new when Wharton wrote, remained new? But presentness, surely, is not always a sustainable quality.
