ABSTRACT
Although she was an early admirer of Modernists as diverse as Proust, Gide, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton did not appreciate James’s late works, and her verdict on T.S. Eliot’s 1917 and 1922 productions was distinctly negative. 1 Yet the creative springboard for her eighteenth novel, The Children (1928), was her intimate knowledge and understanding of the emotional and ethical limitations of the Prufrockian sensibility, a knowledge gained partly from her close friendships with some of the creators of this figure, including Henry James. 2
