Race, culture, nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan - Critical Essay

Carol J. Singley

An avid reader, Edith Wharton devoured volumes of philosophy and religion. As R. W. B. Lewis observes in his biography, she owned more books on religion than any other subject (510). (1) At every stage of life, Wharton searched in religion and philosophy for answers to pressing metaphysical and ontological questions. Among other things, she used these insights to intensify her already complex social and moral portraits of fictional characters. It is not surprising, then, that she would have read one of her age's most highly esteemed historians and philosophers, Ernest Renan (1823-92), especially since she shared with him a standpoint of rationalism and religious skepticism, a sense of irony and the ironic play of ideas, a "view of life as an amusing ideological spectacle" (Chadbourne 104), a high regard for French criticism, (2) and an esteem for France as the epitome of civilization and culture, able to weather any series of disasters. Wharton is on record for praising not only Renan but also SainteBeuve, Anatole France, and Matthew Arnold, all of whom were influenced by Renan. (3) Renan affected Wharton in two major ways. His rational positivism fueled her developing skepticism about the role of faith in a post-Darwinian world increasingly based on science and empiricism. And his ideas about nation and nationhood helped her come to terms with her own expatriation and questions about the preservation and dissemination of cultural value in the early twentieth century.

Wharton read Renan on at least two occasions, one in 1911 and the other in 1917. A catalog of her library indicates that she owned six books by Renan, some annotated, as well as a book about him written by William Barry. (4) Although no record of her opinion of Renan exists, one might speculate how the French thinker affected Wharton personally and influenced her work. It is clear that Wharton appreciated and even propounded many of the ideas with which Renan is identified. He was certainly read and discussed in Wharton's circle. Morton Fullerton, for example, in an essay about Henry James--a piece Wharton admits to having had "a hand" in creating (Letter to William Brownell, qtd. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 300)--favorably compares James's and Renan's standards of probity and faithfulness to their own principles (Fullerton 306). It is likely in particular that Renan's ideas helped Wharton grapple with a monumental issue in the nineteenth century: the balance between faith and reason; or, in the case of Renan, between faith and history. Renan mapped a theory of history, science, and religion that Wharton could apply not only to personal questions of faith but also to her understanding of the larger workings of culture. A skeptic with a keen ironic wit, he also provided Wharton with a literary outlook and mode of execution compatible with her own.

Born in 1823 in Brittany, Ernest Renan was raised a Roman Catholic and educated in seminaries. At age 22 he left the seminary and the church in order to pursue science. In 1848 he wrote The Future of Science (L'avenir de la science), in which he introduced ideas that he would develop all his life. Science, by which he meant rational inquiry, would eventually supplant religion, he maintained, and guide the direction of human progress. Renan's thinking epitomized the positivism and rationalism in vogue during Wharton's time and mirrored in the progression of her ideas. As Lewis remarks, Wharton's childhood passion for sermon reading and "stray wonderings about the vagaries of religious doctrines" (510) were supplanted by the rational positivism taught to her by her mentor, family friend Egerton Winthrop. The effect of this body of thought was "imposing" during Wharton's agnostic years. Although Wharton did not follow in Renan's footsteps--she toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism at the end of her life--she did find reassuring his suspicion of blind faith, his notion of religion as a way to strive for perfection, and his view that this perfection actually existed in the Greek civilization that created art, science, and philosophy. Renan, whose thought anticipated both the existential anguish and the totalitarian messianism of the twentieth century, played a part in helping Wharton make sense of personal and public crises of belief.

Wharton first read Renan in the autumn of her extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton. Saddened by the outcome of the affair and challenged by ill health, she committed herself to a curative spa at Salsimaggiori, Italy. To survive the loneliness there and in a state of what Shari Benstock calls "bored restlessness" (253), she read her way through an assemblage of works of literature, history, and philosophy that she listed in a May 1911 letter to Fullerton. Her readings included Renan's Averroes and Averroism: A Historical Essay (1852), "which," she wrote, "I've never read" (Letters 238), and works by Flaubert, George Henry Lewes, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dostoevsky, Melville, Ludwig Woltmann, and Whitman. Wagner's Life was by far her favorite among the volumes she had "snatched up at haphazard." In comparison, everything else, she wrote, "even Nietzsche, ... will seem insipid."

"Triste a mourir" to part with Fullerton and wistful about the passing of time--"I wish I had known you when I was twenty-five. We might have had some good days together" (Letters 238)--Wharton was at this time particularly receptive to the consolations of philosophy, whether romantic (Flaubert or Wagner) or rational (Renan). She would have found appealing Renan's combination of the Hegelian world of reason with the Nietzschean world of revolt and nihilism, leading to a positive morality without God. She was perhaps looking for heroes, which could explain her interest in the subject of Renan's doctoral dissertation, Averroes, the twelfth-century Arab-born Spanish philosopher. Renan employs a historical method in this biography and prefigures the treatment he gives to his subject in his controversial Life of Jesus (1863).

Wharton turned to Renan again during another crisis. In 1917, with World War I raging and no end to it in sight, Wharton had to acknowledge that it signaled, as David Jones notes, "the Break" with all that had gone before (qtd. in Benstock 332). The war challenged her personal faith, already precarious, and threatened the concept of civilization that she held dear. Her distress was exacerbated by the death of her good friends Henry James and Howard Sturgis. In the fall of 1917 Wharton read Renan's Life of Jesus, perhaps for comfort and certainly for enlightenment and a sense of history. This book, which provides a historical rather than theological account of Jesus and Christianity, and which refers to Jesus as "an incomparable man," (5) had incurred the wrath of the clergy. Despite the outcry, however, such an imaginative as well as historically based portrayal fit well with modernist times, now more disposed toward solutions that were mythical than those that were doctrinal in origin. Renan's Life of Jesus not only presented a secular image, it joined in the refusal to acknowledge Jesus as a Jew and thus participated in the anti-Semitism expressed by many prominent thinkers of the day and manifested as well in Wharton's writings.

Renan's book also helped to address the pressing problem of culture. The Life of Jesus and the two volumes that followed it describe how Christianity spread among the rootless proletariat of the cities of Asia Minor and illustrate the question that preoccupied Renan and others: would the intellectuals of the nineteenth century lead the masses toward a new enlightenment? Wharton's desire for an affirmative answer is evident in her 1920 travel book In Morocco and in other statements that may be characterized as conservative or even colonialist. On the issue of nation and nationhood, Renan's ideas are relevant to Wharton's. He propounded these ideas in "What Is a Nation?" (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?), a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882, and published in his book Discours et conferences in 1887.

This essay, widely credited with laying the foundation of modernist notions of nationhood, enters into a "central historical and philosophical debate" dating from the nineteenth century and continuing in contemporary scholarship. The debate asks whether the nation is an "inherent, natural, eternal, and necessary part of human development" or "a contingent event, a function of historical vicissitudes of power, will, desire, and institutions" (Pecora 22). Work at one end of the spectrum in this debate is represented by Johann Gottfried von Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte; work at the other end is represented by Renan and modernists such as Elie Kedourie and Ernest Gellner. The former view assumes that nations are eternal in spirit and organic in nature. As German philosopher Fichte argues in Foundations of Natural Law (1796), the state is "not something which is primary and which exists for its own sake, but is merely the means for the higher purpose of the ... continuous development of what is purely human in this nation" (qtd. in Pecora 22). The state is finally subordinate to the nation. Or as Lord Acton writes in "Nationality" in 1909, the nation is "a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again" (qtd. in Pecora 23).The latter view, which Renan advocates in "What Is a Nation?" is that race, language, religion, and geography, while useful descriptors, do not determine nationhood. Renan rejects the notion, circulating in Germany under Bismarck and later exploited by Hitler, that a nation requires expansion into territories thought to be racially or anthropologically related to it. "The truth is that there is no pure race.... Is Germany an exception to this rule?" (169), asks Renan, protesting the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. He answers the question with a clear no. (6)

Renan called into question an organic view of nation and state. There were no nations in antiquity, he argued, only loosely held aggregates. For him, nations are historically circumscribed political forms dating from the Teutonic invasions of the fifth through tenth centuries, born out of bloody violence and conquest rather than peaceful evolution. Nations, he argued, must not be confounded with either biological or linguistic races, and one should not attribute to linguistic groups the status of nation-states. In questioning the romantic model that sees race, language, religion, economy, and geography as grounds for national identity, Renan resembles to some extent John Stuart Mill, who held a similarly liberal view of nationhood (Pecora 21). Nations derive from and depend on the collective memory of past glories and past sacrifices made on the nation's behalf; they thrive on the strength of a present will, desire, and need to continue together. The nation is still "a spiritual principle" (Renan, "What Is a Nation" 174) as well as the actual land that comprises it, but nations are not eternal. Renan defines nation not as a group's genealogy but as its common legacy of memories and a commitment to go on together. His view prefigures that of many contemporary scholars who insist that the meaning of nation be restricted to the achieved nation-state; it presages, in particular, Benedict Anderson's argument that nations are "imagined communities," discursively created.

Although it is true, as Frederick Wegener notes in his introduction to Wharton's Uncollected Critical Writings, that her work "stubbornly defies classification, refusing to accommodate or to bind itself to any of the various reigning critical orthodoxies of her day" (31), we can see how Renan's views prefigure Wharton's own. In describing nationhood not as nationalism but as "common glories in the past, and a common will in the present" (174), Renan lays a foundation for Wharton's argument in her nonfictional study French Ways and Their Meaning, in which she celebrates France not just as a political entity but as a "continuity" (76) of traditions, tastes, and values that tie a people together. The idea of a nation as a spiritual family, as something one comes to as a result of affirmation and reaffirmation rather than as an innate or eternal principle, had great appeal for Wharton, an expatriate who adopted France as her nation. Indeed, Wharton's own life demonstrates that although born into a particular culture or nation--in Wharton's case, rarified, upper-class New York--one may cease to identify with it and even discard it in favor something else. Certainly Wharton's success as a woman and a writer depended on her ability to transgress boundaries that family and society believed were indisputable and inviolable, and to form, as Susan Goodman notes, "a small circle of confreres ... who held the same convictions" as she (ix).

French Ways and Their Meaning was published "with the idea of making France and things French more intelligible to the American soldier" (Wharton, Backward 357). The book opens with cautionary remarks about the need to resist easy and misleading generalizations about a nation and its character. The French people, Wharton notes, are currently not themselves because they have been subjected to prolonged attack from Germany: "Four years of desperate resistance to a foe in possession of almost a tenth of the national territory ... represent a strain so severe that one wonders to see ... life in general going on as before" (7). Appealing to her American audience, Wharton asks her reader to "picture our situation if Germany had invaded the United States, and had held a tenth part of our most important territory for four years" Her description of France under duress echoes Renan's view, expressed in "What Is a Nation?" that it is the shared experiences, especially the sufferings and sacrifices that people make in the name of their country, that constitute nation and nationhood.

The remainder of Wharton's project in French Ways looks Janus-faced on Franco-American relations. On the one hand, Wharton wishes to generate sympathy for the French cause by appealing to a fundamental similarity between France and the United States: "the differences between ourselves and the French are mostly on the surface, and our feeling about the most important things is always the same" (15-16). Such an approach is fundamental to her goal of continued American support for the French. Despite the temptation among some Americans to identify with Germany rather than France because of the large number of German immigrants in the US, Wharton asserts that "the Germans, who seem less strange to many of us because we have been used to them at home, differ from us totally in all of the important things" (16). On the other hand, Wharton positions France as a high ideal toward which the younger, cruder American nation should aspire. Although one hears a great deal about "'What America can teach France,'" she writes, it is more worthwhile to "apply ourselves to finding out what they have to teach us" (8-9). Americans are materialistic and crave security; in contrast, the French exhibit qualities of "taste, reverence, continuity, and intellectual honesty." These are traits that a new pioneer people, "destined by fate to break up new continents and experiment in new social conditions, ... have had the least time to acquire" (18-19; original emphasis). (7)

Believing in nation but not necessarily in nationalism, Renan wrote that true patriotism is the courage to declare one's nation mistaken when one believes that it is (Chadbourne 101). On this view Wharton was patriotic when, contrary to public opinion, she urged the US to resist isolationism and become involved in the European conflict (Benstock 298), and when, in French Ways and other works, she criticized American customs in favor of French ones. Abandoning the US for France allowed Wharton a critical perspective that would not have been possible had she remained in her own country. As she wrote in a tribute to literary critic and Scribner's editor William C. Brownell, "America produces numerous critics of life who have found out there is something wrong with Main Street, but do not know the remedy because they never really studied the alternatives" (205). She credits Brownell with having "the intellectual range and detachment needful for the survey of culture." Multicultural well before the term gained currency, Wharton used her knowledge of other nations as the means to lament the inward-turning instincts of early twentieth-century Americans. The US was not only impeding its own cultural growth, it was missing an important global opportunity. It was a "curious" and "suggestive" fact, for example, that "America's acute literary nationalism has developed in inverse ratio to the growth of modern travelling facilities" ("Great American Novel" 156). A renowned lover of technology, Wharton saw tremendous but unfulfilled potential in transatlantic crossings--practical and cultural--that modern travel and communication made possible.

If in some respects Wharton adopted a more global perspective than some of her contemporaries, in other respects she exhibited a resistance to modernity. In Renan's cautionary statements in "What Is a Nation?" we may read a caveat for Wharton. It is a grave error, Renan maintained, to confuse race with nation, because "race makes and remakes itself" (171); history and human conditions constantly break down the strict meaning of race as blood relations. It is sometimes the case that Wharton's terms blur the distinctions Renan carefully delineates. For example, in French Ways, Wharton follows Renan in describing the quality of French reverence as "the sense of the preciousness of long accumulations of experience" (31) and "the instinct to preserve that which has been slow and difficult in the making, and into which the long associations of the past are woven" But she also relates this quality to "some deep racial need, moral or aesthetic." Elsewhere, when discussing transatlantic influences on literature made possible by accelerating technology, she also conflates the terms race and nation. In "The Great American Novel" she writes that although

   it is doubtful if a novelist of one race can ever really penetrate
   into the soul of another, this perpetual interchange of ideas and
   influences is resulting, on both sides of the globe, in the creation
   of a new world, ephemeral, shifting, but infinitely curious to
   study and interesting to note. (157; my emphasis)

It is well known that Wharton frequently railed against what she considered a decline in contemporary American literary standards and that she criticized modernist writers in particular. Like Renan, who worried in Essais de morale that industrialization and increasing bureaucracy threaten the individual spirit upon which all poetry depends (Chadbourne 86), Wharton lamented the fact that "there is no Whitman singing in this generation" (Letters 466). This antimodernist stance, as both Nancy Bentley and Frederick Wegener have noted, although moralistic in tone, actually connotes a social "concern" (Wegener, "Form" 117) or fear that the privileged classes whose Eurocentric values she applauded were losing "social power" as a result of mass cultural change (Bentley, Ethnography 112).Wharton may have theorized that all subject matter is fit for literary expression and protested the notion that "certain categories of human beings are of less intrinsic interest than others" ("Cycle of Reviewing" 162), but she simultaneously declared that "the common mean of American life ... stands for everything which does not rise above a very low average in culture, situation, or intrinsic human interest" ("Great American Novel" 153). In French Ways she understands the individual, culture, and the nation as products of accumulated experience. The acquisition of taste, she asserts, "is the long slow old-fashioned one of education" (53). Yet she holds fast to a notion of national identity as innate, declaring that "The French are naturally endowed with taste" (53; my emphasis). She asks, "Are not some races--the artistically non-creative born as irremediably blind as Kentucky cave-fishes?" and in response offers the truism that "the French are a race of artists" (52). The same metaphor--blind Kentucky cave fish--is enlisted a year later in The Age of Innocence (1920) to suggest cultural and aesthetic myopia in the breed of American upper-class women typified by May Welland.

Wharton held a persistently elitist view that some categories of people were in fact superior to others. This belief, as Jennie Kassanoff points out, operates in The House of Mirth. We see Wharton wrestling in this novel with the same terms of identity that constituted the debate over nationhood at this time. That cultural value is innately embodied in the white elite class is emphasized by her use of organic imagery and descriptions of violations of that natural order. For example, the depiction of Lily as rootless in the final chapter of the novel is, as many have noted, a Darwinian image, but first and foremost it signifies that Lily has lost the threads of tradition and connection that were inherently hers:

   [Lily] had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer
   to her than another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave
   endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from
   which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.
   In whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the
   blood--whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with
   visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built
   with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties--it
   has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual
   existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the
   might sum of human striving. Such a vision of the solidarity of
   life had never before come to Lily. (296-97)

The phrase "whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the blood" can imply that not just a class structure but an entire nation is under siege. A similar conflation of interests is apparent in her manuscript "Disintegration," also discussed by Kassanoff. In this unfinished novel, Henry Clephane muses about the influx of new people and money that has displaced and largely rendered useless the dominant class:

   the place to study [the results] is here and now--here in this
   huge breeding-place of inequalities that we call a republic, where
   class-distinctions, instead of growing out of the inherent needs of
   the social organism, are arbitrarily established by a force that
   works against it! (qtd. in Kassanoff 69, my emphasis)

If Wharton fluctuates in French Ways between conceptions of nation as inherent and as learned, she leans overall toward the latter--that is, toward an understanding in alignment with Renan's. The United States is impoverished in part because it is young. It has not had time to acquire the "patience, deliberateness, reverence" that are "the fundamental elements of taste" (55). Wharton, it follows, staunchly believed in the edifying effects of learning and in the slow process that true education entails. "As long as America believes in short-cuts to knowledge," she asserts, "she will never come into her real inheritance of English culture"

That Wharton described herself as a "rabid imperialist" had friends who advocated a strong US military and economic presence in the world, and focused on the ameliorative rather than the destructive aspects of colonialism is well documented (see Wegener, "Rabid"; Sensibar; and Bauer). Wharton's imperialism was not economically or politically motivated, however, at least not explicitly so. It was, rather, based on an aesthetic and cultural ideal. (8) Wharton spurned the aggressive, entrepreneurial development that motivated American expansionism. She deplored the loss of what "the new order of things has wiped out" and "shudder[ed] at what it was creating" ("Great American Novel" 157). Dale Bauer notes confusion in discussions of Wharton's politics and concludes that divided views reside as much in Wharton herself as in her critics (11). Similarly, Bentley writes that Wharton "exhibited neither blind nostalgia nor a consistent progressivism" ("Wharton" 148). Instead, she wrote with profound ambivalence about the accelerating speed of cultural change in the twentieth century, fascinated by what technology could accomplish, alarmed at what it might destroy. Bentley notes that Wharton's cultural imperialism had as its goal discernment and preservation rather than expansion per se. Although in the case of Morocco, culture was to be inculcated through French colonial rule, at the same time, Wharton lamented the "harm" that the "modern European colonist" would do to "the beauty and privacy of the old Arab towns" (In Morocco 22). There is to Wharton's imperialism, then, a paradoxical quality, a gesturing outward that is aimed not so much at dominance as at retention.

In Wharton's idealism we see links to Renan, who, in a strict sense, is not a nationalist at all. The highest "ideal reality" for him is ultimately not the nation but humanity. Although in "What Is a Nation?" he acknowledges "the principle of nationhood [as] just and legitimate" (172), he imagines that one day a larger family of loyalties will supersede those presently equated with the nation. "Do not let us abandon this fundamental principle," he writes, "that man is a reasonable and moral being, before being allotted to such and such a language, before being a member of such and such a race, an adherent of such and such a culture." Wharton's scope too was broad, despite its Eurocentric, aristocratic blind spots, which she also shared with Renan. She envisioned human connections that might transcend national borders. She acted on these beliefs as she traveled incessantly, conversed in various languages, crossed geopolitical boundaries with little regard to their meaning except as dictated by her own standards of aesthetic beauty and form. She also espoused these ideas as she theorized the writing and criticism of fiction. The critic's "office," she writes in "The Criticism of Fiction," is to dwell on the novelist's "highest gift, on that divining and life-evoking faculty which ... is the very foundation of the novelist's art and the result, not of this or that rule or theory, but of the intense and patient pondering on the depths of life itself" (128). Although not exempt from the cultural biases of her time, Wharton's idealism was international, her sense of nationhood more fluid than fixed. She and Renan believed in a moral consciousness based ultimately on a sense of shared humanity. Such an outlook was, for its time, far from conservative.

Notes

(1.) I analyze philosophical and religious structures and themes in Wharton's fiction in Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. See also Helen Killoran's Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion, which describes Wharton's prodigious knowledge of Western classical and religious traditions.

(2.) Wharton writes in "The Criticism of Fiction":

   France is given to lamenting the extinction of the great literary
   critic ... but France should know more about the average of
   so-called literary criticism in other countries before she
   depreciates her own. The generation of Sainte-Beuve is gone, that of
   M. M. Anatole France, Jules Lemaitre and Emile Faguet is going; but
   two such generations leave in the minds succeeding them so rich a
   deposit and so high a standard that French literary criticism, at
   one of its least original moments, is still a valuable contribution
   to literature. (120)

See also Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 39.

(3.) Wharton wrote that Sainte-Beuve's "Lundis" was "bracing fare for a young mind" (Backward 66-67), and she enjoined her lover Morton Fullerton to "read Arnold" (Letters 281). She may have been familiar with Arnold's essay "Renan."

(4.) According to Ramsden, the books by Ernest Renan that Wharton owned include annotated copies of Averroes et l'averoisme (1852), 3rd ed. (Paris: Levy, 1866) and La Vie de Jesus (1863), 19th ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1893); a copy of Saint Paul (1869), 13th ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1893), unopened; Les evangiles et la seconde generation chretienne (1877), 2nd ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1877); Nouvelles etudes d'Histoire Religieuse (1884), 2nd ed. (n. pub.), with a marked preface; and Le Livre de Job; avec une etude sur l'age et le caractere due poem (1859), 5th ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1894).Also in her library was William Barry's Ernest Renan (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), inscribed "For Edith Wharton from M. P. [Countess Maria Pasalini?] London 1905"

(5.) The phrase is that of the French Catholic prelate Jacques Bossuet (1627-1704), who also described Jesus as "a man of wondrous gentleness" (un homme d'une douceur admirable) (Wardman 77).Wharton read and admired Bossuet; she presented her godson, William Tyler, with a copy of his Sermons just weeks before she died (Tyler 104).

(6.) According to Wardman, a context for Renan's essay "What Is a Nation?" is his 1879 "Letter to a German Friend" (Lettre a un ami d'Allemagne), in which he claims that Germany had not set a positive example politically or culturally (161).

(7.) As Wharton writes in "The Great American Novel":

   America has indeed dedicated herself to other ideals. What she has
   chosen--and realized--is a dead level of prosperity and security.
   Main Street abounds in the unnecessary, but lacks the one thing
   needful. Inheriting an old social organization which provided for
   nicely shaded degrees of culture and conduct, modern America has
   simplified and Taylorized it out of existence, forgetting that in
   such matters the process is necessarily one of impoverishment. (154)

(8.) On the extent to which aesthetic theories are also political, see Bentley, "Wharton, Travel, and Modernity" 161-62.

Works cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Arnold, Matthew. "Renan" Essays in Criticism. 3rd ser. Boston: Ball, 1910. 153-79.

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Bentley, Nancy. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

--. "Wharton, Travel, and Modernity." A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton. Ed. Carol J. Singley. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 147-79.

Chadbourne, Richard M. Ernest Renan. New York: Twayne, 1968.

Colquitt, Clare, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid, eds. A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999.

Fullerton, W. Morton. "The Art of Henry James." Quarterly Review 212 (April 1910): 393-408; Living Age 265 (11 June 1910): 643-52. Rpt. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 304-18.

Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton's Inner Circle. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994.

Kassanoff, Jennie. "Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth. PMLA 115 (Jan. 2000): 60-74.

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Lewis, R.W.B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1975.

Pecora, Vincent P. Introduction. Pecora, Nations and Identities 1-42.

--, ed. Nations and Identities: Classic Readings. New York: Blackwell, 2001.

Ramsden, George. Edith Wharton's Library: A Catalogue. Settrington: Stone Trough, 1999.

Renan, Ernest. Essais de morale et de critique. Oeuvres completes d'Ernest Renan. Ed. Henriette Psichari. Vol. 2. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1947.

--. "What Is a Nation?" Trans. William G. Hutchison. The Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Studies. London: Walter Scott, 1896. Rpt. in Pecora, Nations and Identities 163-76.

Sensibar, Judith L. "Edith Wharton as Propagandist and Novelist: Competing Visions of 'The Great War'" Colquitt, Goodman, and Waid 149-71.

Single, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Tyler, William Royall. "Personal Memories of Edith Wharton" Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 85 (1973): 91-104.

Wardman, H. W. Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography. London: U of London Athlone P, 1964.

Wegener, Frederick, ed. Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.

--. "Form, 'Selection,' and Ideology in Edith Wharton's Antimodernist Aesthetic." Colquitt, Goodman, and Waid 116-38.

--. Introduction. Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 1-16.

--. "'Rabid Imperialist': Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction." American Literature 72.4 (2000): 783-812. Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Scribner's, 1934.

--. "The Criticism of Fiction" Times Literary Supplement 14 May 1914: 229-30. Rpt. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 120-33.

--. "A Cycle of Reviewing." Holograph MS; incomplete TS. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Rpt. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 159-63.

--. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York: Appleton, 1919.

--. "The Great American Novel." Yale Review ns 16 (July 1927): 646-56. Rpt. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 151-59.

--. The House of Mirth. Ed. Shari Benstock. New York: St. Martin's, 1994.

--. In Morocco. New York: Scribner's, 1925.

--. Letter to William Brownell. 2 Mar. 1908. Edith Wharton Archives. Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Libraries, Princeton, NJ.

--. The Letters of Edith Wharton. Ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. New York: Scribner's, 1988.

--. "William C. Brownell" Scribner's Magazine 84 (Nov. 1928): 596-602. Rpt. in Wegener, Uncollected Critical Writings 205-11.

Carol J. Singley is associate professor of English at Rutgers University, Camden. She is the author of Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit and editor or coeditor of five volumes of critical essays on Wharton, feminist theory, Calvinism and modernism, and the American child. She is currently completing a book about representations of adoption in American literature and culture.

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