ABSTRACT
Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country is usually regarded generically as a picaresque novel. Percy Lubbock’s 1947 Portrait of Edith Wharton does for its subject what Rufus Griswold, referred to as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘literary executioner’, does for his. Edith Wharton, who felt in full possession of her narrative powers in the composition of Ethan Frome, is, by 1913, able to guide the reader through her flood subject, the customs of old New York. But like Ralph, in another Jamesian tale, The Portrait of a Lady, he has enabled the entry of beautiful, young American woman into the European society of which American manners are an outgrowth, a declension clarified by an anomalous character in Wharton’s fiction, the Howellsean spokesman, Charles Bowen. The reader knows that she can aspire no higher than she has flown, for ‘her imagination was incapable’, Wharton writes, ‘of long flights’.
