But there\u2019s so much to love and admire in her work: the wit, the dissection of social fossilization, the gimlet-eyed study of women\u2019s objectification, the elegant knife-sharp prose, the passion under the surface.<\/p>\n
Wharton exasperated me with her stereotypical Jew Simon Rosedale in The House of Mirth.<\/em> How could such a gifted author betray her gifts like that?<\/p>\n When I re-wrote her novel as Rosedale<\/em> in Love<\/em><\/a>, I did my own version of her gesture to James by including a secret love and giving my book a surprise happy ending. Why not? I\u2019ve been devoted to her fiction for years and it\u2019s inspired me in my own writing to strive for the best.<\/p>\n Lev Raphael is the author of 25 books in genres from memoir to mystery. His other Wharton-inspired book is a mystery, The Edith Wharton Murders<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Edith Wharton isn’t a writer you tend to think of on Valentine\u2019s day. Her marriage was unhappy and the very secret affair she had in her forties was with a faithless cad. No wonder that love in her novels is so often curdled, thwarted, or hopeless. Think of Ethan Frome, The Reef, The Custom of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[249,1077,250,1076,1030,1029,346,1028,1078,1075,1074],"class_list":["post-3095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edith-wharton","tag-edith-wharton","tag-ethan-frome","tag-henry-james","tag-love","tag-rosedale-in-love","tag-the-age-of-innocence","tag-the-edith-wharton-murders","tag-the-house-of-mirth","tag-the-mothers-recompense","tag-valentines-day","tag-valentines-day-2018"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3095"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3115,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3095\/revisions\/3115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Rosedale.jpg\")
<\/a>Wharton\u2019s The Age of Innocence<\/em> ends with a quiet nod to a possible lost love of Henry James, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff wrote in her study A Feast of Words<\/em>. Wharton knew a touching story that James had told to a mutual friend: when he was younger, James had once stood for hours somewhere in Europe, staring up at a balcony window, hoping to see a face. He hadn\u2019t said whose face it was and Wharton recast the story in her own way at the end of The Age of Innocence<\/em>. It was a loving private tribute to a man, now dead, who might have exasperated her sometimes but whom she had been devoted to.<\/p>\n