ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the British critical reception of Wharton from The Greater Inclination (1899) to Summer (1917), drawing on magazine and newspaper reviews and publisher correspondence. Long before Wharton wrote The House of Mirth (1905), she was known as a masterly short story writer, adept at the moral conundrums of divorce and social climbing. Reviewers’ comments about the unexpected lengths of her fictions and her correspondence with Macmillan make clear that the British marketplace’s expectations played a major role in Wharton’s aspiration to write full-length novels. The elements of Wharton’s fiction that made her a modern writer (the diffuseness of the moral message, the interest in the sex relation) also made her a writer of and for women. Nascent feminist readings of her work demonstrate the interconnectedness of her modernity and her feminism, and these nascent feminist readings survived World War I.
