middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman. As in Ethan Frome, the reader of “The Pretext” is invited to explore multiple perspectives.

Whatever the case, at the time she wrote “The Pretext,” Wharton had embarked on a relationship with the young journalist Morton Fullerton, which began as a friendship in 1907 and eventually deepened into intimacy in 1908. The affair continued until 1910, the year she was writing Ethan Frome, and several critics have detected autobiographical echoes of her liaison with Fullerton and of her unhappy marriage to the sickly Teddy Wharton in several of her works.

Most of Wharton’s fictional works follow the principles of realism, but in The Writing of Fiction (1925) and in her preface to Ghosts (1937) she expresses a fondness for the supernatural tale. “Afterward” (1910), a ghost story set in England, shares with Ethan Frome an interest in the “back-waters of existence,” a setting that can breed “strange acuities of emotion” (p. 138). The Boynes, the couple in the story, come to England to escape the pace of life in the United States. Mary’s husband is a successful engineer eager to find time to work on a book-length project. As in Ethan Frome, the past literally comes back to haunt the couple in the guise of a figure who had committed suicide—a victim, unbeknownst to Mary, of her husband’s cheating in business dealings. The recognition that this figure is a ghost comes “afterward”; but the real horror of the story does not derive from stock Gothic machinery so much as from the wife’s belated realization of her husband’s ruthless nature. As in Ethan Frome, a husband and wife have fallen into silence, and Mary learns about parts of his life he had kept from her. Once again Wharton penetrates the superficial veneer of a couple’s relationship to reveal the secret tensions in an apparently stable marriage.

In the Higher Thought Club of “The Pretext,” the Uplift Club of “The Legend” (1910), and the Lunch Club of “Xingu” (1916), Wharton makes fun of the cultural pretensions of her day. In “The Legend,” the devotees of “Pellerinism” fail to recognize the great figure who is the founder of the philosophy they study and follow. “Xingu” takes place in Hillbridge, Wharton’s version of a New England university town and the setting of several of her other stories, including “The Recovery” (1901). In the Lunch Club, the assembled ladies are mistresses of derivative knowledge and pseudo-sophisticated erudition. Their conversation turns to what they think to be mystical and occult philosophy, but only gradually do they realize that Xingu is a river in Brazil. Into their midst they welcome the celebrated novelist Osric Dane, author of the newly published The Wings of Death. As several Wharton critics have noted, Dane may be a satiric portrayal of her mentor Henry James, author of The Wings of the Dove (1902). Wharton may be having some gentle fun at the expense of James’s obscure writing style, especially in his lengthy and involved later novels. As one of Wharton’s “culture band” notes of the ending of The Wings of Death: “The beautiful part of it ... is surely just this—that no one can tell how ‘The Wings of Death’ ends. Osric Dane, overcome by the awful significance of her own meaning, has mercifully veiled it—perhaps even from herself” (p. 206). Critic Barbara White suggests there may also be a little of Edith Wharton herself in Dane; Wharton may be poking gentle fun at herself, particularly at the charges of pessimism and bleakness that critics applied to several of her works. One club member wonders aloud if the “pessimistic tendency” of Dane’s book expresses her “own convictions.” Perhaps alluding to Wharton’s settings, the same speaker alludes to the “sombre background” that throws her characters into “vivid relief” (p. 212). If Wharton gave subtle shadings to her scenic contrasts in Ethan Frome and other works, this artistry is reduced in Dane’s hands to “the dark hopelessness of it all—the wonderful tone-scheme of black on black” (p. 207).

Kent Ljungquist has been Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (the technological college in Worcester, Massachusetts, mentioned in Ethan Frome) since 1987. At WPI he teaches courses in American Realism, regional writing, and supernatural fiction. He has done both critical and editorial work on a range of nineteenth-century authors: Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mary Hallock Foote, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Frederic S. Cozzens. He