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‘In Rattray’s hands, Edith Wharton is re-presented as a writer mastering a wide range of genres beyond the celebrated fiction. Wharton’s achievements in poetry, drama, architecture and design, criticism, memoir, and travel writing emerge as sites for her most confident, radical experiments. This game-changing book will lay to rest the image of the grand dame, showing Wharton to defy categorization and to be as “large” and full of “multitudes” as the Whitman she so admired.’ — Emily J. Orlando, Professor of English at Fairfield University, USA, and author of Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts (2007) Based on extensive new archival research, Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction offers the first study of Wharton’s full engagement with original writing in genres outside those with which she has been most closely identified. So much more than an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Wharton is reconsidered in this book as a controversial playwright, a gifted poet, a trailblazing travel writer, an innovative and subversive critic, a hugely influential design writer, and an author who overturned the conventions of autobiographical form. Her versatility across genres did not represent brief sidesteps, temporary diversions from what has long been read as her primary role as novelist. Each was pursued fully and whole-heartedly, speaking to Wharton’s very sense of herself as an artist and her connected vision of artistry and art. The stories of these other Edith Whartons, born through her extraordinary dexterity across a wide range of genres, and their impact on our understanding of her career, are the focus of this new study, revealing a bolder, more diverse, subversive and radical writer than has long been supposed
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