Wendy W. Fairey

The Letters of Edith Wharton. Edited by R. B. W. Lewis and Nancy Lewis. Scribner's. $29.95.I hate excessively to be forty," wrote Edith Wharton to her friend, Sara Norton, a response to the latter's 1902 birthday greeting. "Not that I think it a bad [...]

Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. By Sharon O'Brien. Oxford. $24. 95. Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879—1923. By Joan Richardson. Morrow. $21. 95. In the spring of 1906, Willa Cather, age 33, arrived in New York to assume the managing edito [...]

There is a passage in Daniel Deronda, George Eliot's final novel, that urges the benefits of passing one's childhood in a well-loved place. Pitying the heroine whose unrooted early years have left her without inner guidance in a venal, aimless mili [...]

I often used to wonder if I would miss my father when he died. We had not been close or even had much contact. Would it really matter if he were no longer there, across the ocean in England, puttering about his pseudo-ancestral property in Sussex o [...]