Edith Wharton’s <i>The Glimpses of the Moon</i> (1922): A Marginal Work?

Abstract Edith Wharton’s The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) was a greater popular and financial success when it was published than The Age of Innocence (1920), selling sixty thousand copies in three weeks and being adapted for the big screen within the first year of its publication. Despite recent interest within Wharton scholarship for the author’s lesser-known genres and works, the novel remains of marginal interest to readers, school curricula, and scholarship. While the novel bears some similarities to Wharton’s other works in terms of themes and settings, it also has a light and escapist tone, which radically breaks with other texts and reframes the novel as a turning point in Wharton’s corpus. After accessing unpublished material in the Wharton archival collection at the Beinecke Library in May 2024, I retrace in this paper The Glimpses of the Moon’s genesis, publication, and reception and attempt to do justice to the complexity and originality of the novel. Taking a closer look at Wharton’s lesser-known novels, I suggest, opens up richer ways of understanding her work.