the coastal towns of the region, having spent extended periods during her childhood and adult years in Newport and in Bar Harbor, Maine. In her fairly late story “The Little Gentleman,” first published in 1926 as “The Young Gentleman,” she attempted to capture the atmosphere of the fictional seaport town of Harpledon, somewhere between Salem and Newburyport on the New England coast. As recounted by one of Harpledon’s inhabitants, the primary characteristic of this coastal town was its resistance to change and progress: “How we resisted modern improvements, ridiculed fashionable ‘summer resorts,’ fought trolley-lines, overhead wires and telephones, wrote to the papers denouncing municipal vandalism and bought up (those that could afford it) one little heavy-roofed house after another, as the land-speculators threatened them.” In this story as well as others, Wharton would penetrate the sometimes horrifying reality behind the quaint antiquity of local surroundings.

However charming the surfaces of the remote towns and villages, quaintness and rusticity were hardly the characteristics Wharton explored in other works about New England, the object of her intense if intermittent attention from the 1890s until the later years of her career. The sleepy town in Wharton’s Summer (1917) is North Dormer, a “village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway, trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern communities.” Wharton’s treatment of New England settings was varied, and her attitude toward the region complex. With regard to characters, she portrayed the working poor and rustic natives as well as proud aristocrats. As regards settings, she developed provincial seacoast locales, poverty-stricken farms, and the pseudo-sophisticated culture of university towns. Whatever the range of setting and characterization, the primary characteristics that seem to dominate Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (the book she called her “hot Ethan”) are isolation, remoteness, and barrenness. Reflecting an interest in New England that was developed over the course of nearly two decades, she came to a general conclusion about the region in a letter written to a friend: “This grim New England country, for all its beauty, gives nothing to compensate for the complete mental starvation.”

In Newport she devoted considerable time to remodeling the cottage and grounds of her family estate, activities reflecting an interest in house design and landscape architecture developed in the early years of her marriage. Her keen visual sense led to her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), and she applied an appreciation of form, balance, and proportion to many of her literary and architectural creations. In 1899 she visited Lenox, Massachusetts, spent the summer and fall of 1900 there, and in 1901 finished negotiations for the purchase of a 113-acre plot of land that extended to the neighboring town of Lee. She modeled the property after an estate in England, and in 1902 she moved into the Mount, named after the home of a Revolutionary War ancestor. She returned there annually until 1908. As it was for Wharton, western Massachusetts had been a favorite vacation spot and summer retreat for artists, writers, and members of the intelligentsia since the early decades of the nineteenth century.

In her autobiography, Wharton referred to the estate as “my first real home,” a place that offered an “escape to the real country” (Wharton, A Backward Glance, pp. 124-125; see “For Further Reading”). In its guise as a retreat it presented a relaxed setting for walks, gardening, and frequent automobile rides through the Berkshire countryside. She entertained visitors there, among them her close friend and confidant Walter Berry, who assisted her with revisions of Ethan Frome. James Edward Johnson, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also visited, and Sara and Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) came from their nearby home in Ashfield. When not entertaining companions or improving the house and grounds, Wharton pursued her serious literary projects. Since her time away from New York usually lasted from June to December, she wrote contentedly: “The country quiet stimulated my creative zeal” (A Backward Glance, p. 125). The Mount clearly occupied a special place in Wharton’s personal and imaginative life. As she later noted: “only at the Mount ... I was truly happy” (p. 149).

If Wharton developed a sensitivity to the quiet beauty of the New England landscape, she was even more intrigued by the region’s historical evolution (or devolution) and its literary past. By 1900 New England’s once flourishing maritime industry was past its prime, and many of its seaports presented images of economic and physical decay. Social and demographic changes had accelerated