Main content

Edith Wharton

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Wharton's novels, which explore the world of the privileged in America's Gilded Age, in which she lived, written in hindsight and with little mercy.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works of Wharton (1862-1937) such as The Age of Innocence for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and was the first woman to do so, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. Her novels explore the world of privileged New Yorkers in the Gilded Age of the late C19th, of which she was part, drawing on her own experiences and written from the perspective of the new century, either side of WW1 . Among her themes, she examined the choices available to women and the extent to which they could ever really be free, even if rich.

With

Dame Hermione Lee
Biographer, former President of Wolfson College, Oxford

Bridget Bennett
Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds

And

Laura Rattray
Reader in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

49 minutes

Last on

Thu 4 Oct 2018 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

READING LIST:

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (University of Georgia Press, 1982)

Millicent Bell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton (Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Irene Goldman-Price, My Dear Governess: The Letters听of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann (Yale University Press, 2012)

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton's Women: Friends and Rivals (University Press of New England, 1990)

Jennifer Haytock, Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2008)

Pamela Knights, The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (Vintage, 2008)

R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (eds.), The Letters of Edith Wharton (Simon & Schuster, 1988)

Alan Price, The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War (Robert Hale Ltd, 1996)

Laura Rattray (ed.), Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Carol Singley (ed.), A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Edith Wharton (ed. Stephen Orgel), The Age of Innocence (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Edith Wharton (ed. Martha Banta), The House of Mirth (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Edith Wharton (ed. Elaine Showalter), Ethan Frome (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Edith Wharton (ed. Laura Rattray), Summer (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Edith Wharton (ed. Stephen Orgel), The Custom of the Country (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Edith Wharton (introduced by Marilyn French), Roman Fever (Virago Press, 1998)

Broadcasts

  • Thu 4 Oct 2018 09:00
  • Thu 4 Oct 2018 21:30

Featured in...

In Our Time podcasts

Download programmes from the huge In Our Time archive.

The In Our Time Listeners' Top 10

If you鈥檙e new to In Our Time, this is a good place to start.

Arts and Ideas podcast

Download the best of Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.

Podcast