Editor’s Note

With this issue, the editorial team is most happy to welcome Lina Geriguis as the journal’s book review editor. Lina joined the editorial team last summer and we all feel extremely fortunate to have her in this role.We are also pleased to announce two new additions to the journal’s editorial board and thank them for their willingness to contribute their time to advancing Wharton scholarship. They are Margaret Jay Jessee and Paul J. Ohler. The list of editorial board members can be found on the inside cover.We are now twenty-five years into the twenty-first century. What was Wharton doing at the quarter-century mark of the twentieth? The Mother’s Recompense appeared in volume form in April, after its serial publication the previous year, and in October, the series of essays that had been appearing in Scribner’s throughout the year was published as The Writing of Fiction. Her letter writing, with its details both great and small through which she fostered her many friendships and relationships, continued strong. Always ready to share her reading responses, on June 9, she wrote enthusiastically to lifelong friend Daisy (Margaret Mary Chanler): “I’m plunged at this moment in a masterpiece 20 years old, which I had never read: The Life of Pasteur. What a man—& what a book! He did feel life to be a vale of soul-making! I wonder who does in the day we live in?” Wharton’s query transcends her own “day” to resonate with all days, including our own.Not only does Wharton consistently make the astute forward-looking comment but she also continually asks the significant question. Following her lead, this issue’s articles probe two of Wharton’s most popular and most studied novels: The Age of Innocence and Summer.Joe Larios approaches Wharton through the courtly love structure outlined in Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In “Newland Archer and the Courtly Love Structure in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence,” Larios traces how Newland’s passionate investment in Ellen as unattainable stabilizes his relationship with May but at the same time disallows the full pleasures that his marriage might offer and prevents a meaningful relationship with Ellen.Anthony Dathy’s “Beyond Ideals: Edith Wharton’s Critique of Transcendentalism in Summer” suggests that the novel provides a “metatextual commentary” reflecting Wharton’s ambivalence toward transcendentalist tenets. Employing a range of stylistic and interdisciplinary approaches, Dathy argues that the novel’s “traces of transcendentalist thought” serve to foreground issues like gender and class, which usually occupy the margins in transcendentalism, as Wharton formulates “a new cultural synthesis relevant to her time.”In the issue’s next section, we turn to a roundtable on ghost stories by Wharton and two other American women writers: Shannon Brennan took the lead for “Home and Unheimlich: The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Brennan and contributors Leah B. Glasser, Paul J. Ohler, and Jana Tigchelaar mingle freely and creatively with the specters of these writers as they discuss the continuing (I can’t resist adding haunting) presence of these works in critical discourse.The EWS archivist, Carole Shaffer-Koros, has provided the history of the Society in past issues. In “The Edith Wharton Review: Our Fortieth Anniversary in 2024,” she turns to the history of the journal as it has evolved since its inception in 1984. These histories provide invaluable records of the development of Wharton studies.The “Notes on . . .” section has Ryan Edward Pine’s discussion of The Custom of the Country, in which he notes the novel’s satiric aspects and invokes the myth of Narcissus to suggest the novel’s alignments with trends and patterns in contemporary social media. Pine shows the novel to be a productively teachable text in today’s college classrooms.Adele Kudish adds to the journal’s continuing attention to theatrical and other transmedial adaptations of Wharton in her review of the chamber opera In Venice, performed in Manhattan in the fall of 2024. Composer Paul Scherer and librettist Germaine Shames turn to two Wharton works for their creation: The Touchstone and “The Muse’s Tragedy.”In the book review section, all three books reviewed have significant sections on Wharton’s works. One involves literary naturalism and two focus on the progressive era. Eric W. Hughes reviews the volume of essays coedited by Kenneth K. Brandt and Karin M. Danielsson entitled The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism; Stephanie Palmer reviews Hannah Huber’s Sleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature; and Laura R. Fisher reviews Arielle Zibrak’s Writing against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era.The editorial team extends its sincere thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for this issue and to the production team at Pennsylvania State University Press.