Edith Wharton and Henry James

*Bell, Millicent. Edith Wharton and Henry James: A Story of their Friendship . New York: Peter Olsen, 1965.

*Robert K. Martin - Ages of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Henry James Review 21:1 The Henry James Review 21.1 (2000) 56-62 Ages of Innocence: Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne Robert K. Martin Papers from the James-Conrad-Ford Conference There has long been resistance to an examination of the literary relation between Henry James and Edith Wharton. Those feminists who helped to revive interest in Wharton were wary of offering the possibility for reasserting a unidirectional influence from the strong James to the weak Wharton. As Millicent Bell argues, the critical assumption of Wharton as "a faithful follower" of the Master prevented study of "the actual degree and nature of the artistic relationship" (216). Instead of this fixed pattern of indebtedness, Bell sees in Wharton a process in which "an early desire to emulate yields to an irritated sense of the need to assert her distinctiveness" (217). To pursue Bell's argument, one needs both a more complex feminism that can allow Wharton to engage with James as an equal as well as a revised view of influence, in which a subtle concept of response and rewriting can replace the kind of one-way street of powerful writers and weak readers proposed by Harold Bloom. This essay looks at such questions through an analysis of one particular relationship: Wharton's response in The Age of Innocence (1920) to James's The Europeans (1878). There are striking...

*Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters : 1900-1915 by Lyall Harris Powers (Hardcover - Jan 1990)

*Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton
By Jessica Levine
Published by Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415938600, 9780415938600
233 pages