Her son’s mind flashes back to an incident when he was a boy of twelve watching, with older people, the rapid and unbecoming rush of folk from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which was on fire. With her admirable technique, Mrs. Wharton at once slips quietly back to the incident itself, and we follow Lizzie Hazeldean in her progress from the scene of so much confusion—a flight, but a controlled flight. This story holds a surprise for the reader, who will not be likely to surmise Mrs. Hazeldean’s true feeling any more than Henry Prest did. The scene between these two, meeting for the first time after Charles Hazeldean’s death, is incomparably well done.
Surely these four novelettes will be read a half-century hence with as much appreciation as today! For such work, for such New York primitives, one feels there can be no false dawn. I have no doubt that the immediate effect, only partly traceable to the presence in the background of some of the same persons, like Mrs. Manson Mingot and Mr. Sillerton Jackson, will be to set everyone to re-reading The Age of Innocence. Which is entirely as it should be, for they will find that novel fresher, livelier, more wistful and even more beautifully satisfactory today than four years ago.
A NOTE ON EDITH WHARTON
For a full list of Edith Wharton’s books and for reference to several important discussions of her work, see the chapter on her in either Authors of the Day or American Nights Entertainment.
The Age of Innocence is a story of New York society in the ’Seventies. It was published in 1920, receiving the Pulitzer Prize, awarded by Columbia University, as the best American novel of its year (over Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street). The four novelettes called Old New York were published in 1924 (separate volumes, or set) and are:
| False Dawn (The ’Forties) |
| The Old Maid (The ’Fifties) |
| The Spark (The ’Sixties) |
| New Year’s Day (The ’Seventies) |
20. Not Found Elsewhere
i
Certain books which have seemed not to drop naturally into the scheme of my other chapters are to be discussed in this; but that does not mean an entire lack of relation among them. I shall first say something about books dealing with Europe; then something about books on American subjects. Both these groups are mainly of an historical character. There will then remain for our attention a few books of a somewhat diverse but distinctive character.