vaults, is one of the most imposing Gothic structures in England.

10 (p. 132) “a convex curve to the surface of the vaulting conoid”: In January 1908 Henry James wrote to Wharton about a petite donnée (small gift): The incident of a young Englishman attending Harvard, who had defied family wishes and fallen in love with the wife of a professor. In his letter, James turned the idea of the story over to Wharton to use as she saw fit. According to their imagined resolution, an English relative would confront the professor’s wife, a middle-aged woman, with the news that the young man had used her as a “pretext” for breaking an engagement with a woman back in England (Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900-1915, pp. 87-88). In Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship (George Braziller, 1965), author Millicent Bell identifies the character Guy Dawnish as John Pollock, who attended Harvard Law School from 1903 to 1904. According to Bell, Wharton brings English values and cultural traits into the story via her characterization of Dawnish, but makes the story uniquely her own rather than a facile imitation of James’s idea.

“Afterward ”

1 (p. 133) Afterward: “Afterward” was published in Century Magazine (January 1910) before being collected in Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910).

2 (p. 135) Dorsetshire: Dorsetshire, known today as Dorset, is a county in the south of England; it was part of the “Old West Saxons,” known as Wessex, the setting for novels by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928).

3 (p. 137) Mary Boyne, abruptly exiled from New York by her husband’s business, had endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town: Just as in Ethan Frome Wharton notes the cultural deprivation of parts of New England, in this story Mary Boyne notes the “soul-deadening” fourteen years she endured in the Midwest, cut off from America’s cultural centers.

4 (p. 138) waiting in the library for the lamps to come, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth: Several key scenes in Wharton’s supernatural fiction occur in a library. A library, for example, is the setting for the telling of ghostly tales in her short story “The Eyes” (1910). Some critics have suggested that this setting intrigued Wharton because of the importance of her father’s library during her formative years. As she noted in A Backward Glance, “The old New York to which I came back as a little girl meant to me chiefly my father’s library.” The library “had a leading share in my growth,” and “the library calls me back” (p. 64).

5 (p. 163) “I guess it’s what the scientists call the survival of the fittest”: The phrase “survival of the fittest” derives from English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection; it was presumably coined by English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Some social Darwinists applied Darwin’s scientific ideas to the social and business world, attempting to account for the advantages the strong appear to have over the weak. Wharton credited her friend Egerton Winthrop with introducing her to “the wonder-world of nineteenth-century science,” as she called it in A Backward Glance (p. 94). In addition to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), Wharton read the works of Spencer, English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), and English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895).

“The Legend”

1 (p. 169) The Legend: “The Legend” was published in Scribner’s Magazine (March 1910) before it was collected in Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910).

2 (p. 193) the Strand: This British periodical was perhaps best known as the publisher of the detective fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), most notably his Sherlock Holmes stories, the first of which appeared in July 1891. The periodical was founded in 1891 by Sir George Newnes (1851-1910).

“Xingu”

1 (p. 201) Xingu: “Xingu” was first published in Scribner’s Magazine (December 1911) before being collected in Xingu, and Other Stories (1916). Wharton noted that most of the stories in that collection were composed before the outbreak of World War I.

2 (p. 203) Hillbridge: Hillbridge is a fictional university town Wharton used in an earlier story, “The Recovery” (1901), as well as in other works.

3 (p. 205) Brazil: Xingu is in fact a river in Brazil. Wharton may have gotten information about this tributary of the Amazon from Henry James, whose brother William once participated in a scientific expedition to Brazil.

4 (p. 205) she had been so absorbed in a novel of Trollope’s: Wharton enjoyed the fiction