‘Don't Cry – It ain't that Kind of a Story’

The stories written between 1908 and 1912 map the evolution of Edith Wharton’s creative progress towards The Custom of the Country. The subject was suggested to Wharton by Henry James, and the name Ransom, with its Christian resonances, is likely to be an allusion to the lawyer Basil Ransom in The Bostonians. Evelyn E. Fracasso writes of the ‘scathing satire’ of Wharton’s treatment of the Wentworth ‘tone’, calling it ‘one of her strongest indictments of upper-class society’. Indeed, Wharton’s female protagonists seldom have the ability to make significant choices, at best steering a path through circumstances not of their own making. One imagines Wharton turning to her novel, only to flee back to the safer, concentrated, defined space of the short story. Wharton, who filled her own ‘collections’ with specimens of human nature from her ‘museum of memories’, could hardly have described herself more accurately.