ZENOBIA: I would like to discuss the possibility of hiring another housekeeper if Mattie ever gets married
as you know I'm chronically ill
and the doctor insists I have a live-in carer to help treat my condition
One cannot expect the new owners of one’s home to maintain indefinitely the sound principles of design and the wholesomeness of purpose with which one has invested it. Nor can one account for what Symonds has called, rather charitably I should think, “the vicissitudes of taste.” Bearing this firmly in mind, it would be dishonest to suggest that I was not disheartened to learn my former home at Fourteen West Twenty-Third Street is now a…
Previously in this series: The Animorphs and Sylvia Plath. Ethan Frome is probably a book about a man named Ethan Frome who just loves to go sledding. "There goes Ethan Frome," the villagers say, "probably going sledding again, on account of how much he loves sledding." He's just nuts about it, I guess. At first the other villagers aren't so sure about how much Ethan Frome loves to go sledding, but eventually they…
Oh, how I loved Edith Wharton. We were like two peas in a pod. True, she grew up stifled by the conventions of Old New York at the turn of the century, and I grew up on an Adirondack commune during the Age of Aquarius. But we both felt such claustrophobia, her in the drawing room, me with the hippies and the trees.
After one reads all of Jane Austen’s novels, one begins fumbling through the literary desert seeking the Next Jane. Eventually, the search alights on Edith Wharton. Wharton, like Austen, uses feather-light prose to describe juicy conflicts: marriages of convenience vs. love matches, rich people jockeying for status with the slightly less rich. It’s all extremely satisfying, except for the glaring difference: unlike Austen, who bestows happy endings on her heroines, Wharton is a pessimist: a curmudgeonly,…
