The accomplishment of Edith Wharton.(author)

Edith Wharton counted her friendship with Henry James as the crown jewel of her career, but it just might have been a curse. During her lifetime she was labeled, inaccurately, as a disciple of James, an apprentice who inevitably fell short of the Master. Since her death she has continued to be compared with him, never to her advantage. Like her contemporary Georges Braque, she always comes in a poor second.

Wharton idolized James, to be sure, but she had a real sense of her own power as an author and of her artistic strengths, which were not his, and she chafed at the persistent coupling of her name with her friend's. "The continued cry that I am an echo of Mr. James (whose books of the last ten years I can't read, much as I delight in the man) ... makes me feel rather hopeless," she complained in 1904. It is true that the two writers had some obvious points in common: they were both upper-crust East Coast Americans who tended to write about their own kind; they both transplanted themselves to Europe in middle age but continued to be obsessed with their native country, despising its narrow culture but never ceasing to be haunted by its crude beauties.

Still, the differences between Wharton and James were more marked than the similarities. Many of James's tics and foibles, attractive to some readers and alienating to others, displeased his "disciple" and were avoided by her. Unlike James, Wharton was never precious or arch, and she usually preferred the straight route to the circuitous one. Her style is more decided, more "masculine" perhaps, than his. And she instinctively rejected his obsession with fictional structure, which she felt was too often achieved at the expense of truth and life.

 
   His latest novels, for all their profound moral beauty, seemed to me more 
   and more lacking an atmosphere, more and more severed from that thick 
   nourishing human air in which we all live and move.... [H]is stage was 
   cleared like that of the Theatre Francais in the good old days when no 
   chair or table was introduced that was not relevant to the action. 

No one could accuse Wharton of isolating her characters in such a rarefied atmosphere. She was expert, by nature and by training, at sensing the exact significance of every external detail. Each of her characters has his place within an intricate social web; each is circumscribed within a physical setting that tells us a great deal about who he is--or, just as often, who he is not. Here, for instance, is a woman who has just discovered that her second marriage, as her first had, is falling:

 
   Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the scene 
   of so many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the 
   quiet-coloured walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers 
   scattered here and there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres, 
   recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of her 
   first marriage had been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, 
   with a picture of a Roman peasant above the mantelpiece, and a Greek slave 
   in "statuary marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It 
   was a room with which she had never been able to establish any closer 
   relation than that between a traveler and a railway station; and now, as 
   she looked about at the surroundings which stood for her deepest 
   affinities--the room for which she had left that other room --she was 
   startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. The prints, 
   the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a 
   superficial refinement which had no relation to the deeper significance of 
   life. 

This is an exquisite example of emotional shorthand. So is a moment in Wharton's story "The Other Two" (1904) where a man meeting his wife's first husband is struck not so much by his person as by one particular garment: