Editor’s Note

The contents of this issue of the Edith Wharton Review make Wharton’s global interests and experiences amply evident calling for further critical interventions into the works discussed. Allyson Stack explores the concept of wonder with its aesthetic resonance in terms of Wharton’s responses to some of the great cathedrals of France, the cathedral of Amiens in particular. In “Edith Wharton’s A Motor-Flight through France and the Aesthetics of Wonder,” Stack draws on Philip Fisher’s understanding of Cartesian wonder that allows for “specialist knowledge” along with “emotion and sensation” to provide a deep analysis of Wharton’s aesthetic appreciations.Laëtitia Nebot-Deneuville’s article, “Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon (1922): A Marginal Work?,” incorporates research that the Edith Wharton Society Award for Archival Research enabled when Nebot-Deneuville was its recipient. Nebot-Deneuville provides a detailed account of Glimpses’s “genesis, publication, and reception” and points to the ways in which the novel marks a turning point in Wharton’s corpus making it worthy of greater critical attention.This issue includes another roundtable discussion, “On (Working with) Edith Wharton’s Letters.” With Katrin Horn leading and organizing the conversation, contributors Elif S. Armbruster, Irene Goldman-Price, and Julie Olin-Ammentorp, along with input from Shafquat Towheed, engage in a thoughtful and stimulating exchange about the difficulties as well as benefits and joys that approaches to Wharton through her remarkable correspondence entail.In the “Notes on . . .” section, Guy Lancaster takes Wharton’s essay “The Great American Novel” as a starting point for a philosophical discussion of where and how to position the concept of tragedy in The Age of Innocence and The Children especially as it relates to Newland Archer and Martin Boyne.Wharton’s work continues its presence in other media. Noel Sloboda provides a review (with photographs) of the adaptation for the stage of The Age of Innocence by Karen Zacarias, directed by Hana S. Sharif, performed at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, in late February/early March 2025.Three book reviews comprise the book review section. Isabelle Parsons reviews Sebastian P. Klinger’s Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899–1929, which, while only minimally focused on Wharton’s work, provides a useful context for Wharton’s representation of physical stress and her introduction of pharmaceutical drugs into her fiction.Two other book reviews focus directly on Wharton’s work. Stacy E. Holden reviews Ágnes Zsófia Kovács’s critical study The Memory of Architecture in Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing, and Trinity Kendrick reviews Emily J. Orlando’s edition of Wharton’s coauthored work The Decoration of Houses.Conference activities involving Wharton continue strong. Elizabeth Youngman contributes a summary of the Edith Wharton Society panels at the May 2025 American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA: Wharton and Democracy, and Wharton and Popular Culture.The last item is a list of the presentations on the EWS panel at the MLA 2025 conference in New Orleans, LA.The many aspects of Edith Wharton’s writings continue to stimulate and surprise, call for further research, and invite insightful and engaging approaches to her work, her life, and our world.As always, the editors are grateful to our anonymous reviewers, contributors, PSUP’s staff, and the journal’s readers.