The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton — Part 2 — Reading Companion

The Ghost That Cannot Be Seen

In 'Afterward,' the Boynes deliberately seek an uncomfortable old house, believing that 'the least hint of convenience' would spoil its authenticity. Their romanticism is punctured by the story's central irony: the ghost they half-jokingly demand is present but unrecognizable. Wharton withholds the supernatural reveal, instead focusing on the couple's gradual unease. The narrative voice remains coolly observational, noting how Mary 'had noted a sudden' shift in Alida Stair's expression—a detail that hints at knowledge the characters lack. The story's structure mirrors its theme: meaning arrives only in retrospect, too late to alter events.

The Comedy of Intellectual Pretension

'Xingu' satirizes a women's lunch club whose members perform intellectual seriousness while betraying profound ignorance. Mrs. Leveret, anxious about her worthiness, parrots opinions she does not understand; Mrs. Plinth asks questions she alone is permitted to answer. The humor sharpens when Mrs. Roby, who reads Trollope for amusement, disrupts their solemn discussion of a novel called 'The Wings of Death.' Her simple question—'Do they get married in the end?'—exposes the gap between the club's pretensions and genuine engagement. Wharton's dialogue captures the rhythms of social one-upmanship, where books are weapons rather than sources of insight.

Contrasts in Voice and Setting

The collection juxtaposes the gothic atmosphere of 'Afterward' with the drawing-room comedy of 'Xingu.' In the former, the Dorsetshire landscape is described through its 'deplorable uncertainty of the water-supply' and lack of electric light; in the latter, the action is confined to a club room where reputations are made and unmade by literary opinions. Wharton shifts register accordingly: the prose in 'Afterward' is measured and ominous, while 'Xingu' crackles with brittle dialogue. Yet both stories examine how people construct narratives about themselves—whether through a house's history or a book's supposed profundity—and how those narratives can collapse under scrutiny.

Readers approaching these stories will find that Wharton's early work already displays her characteristic precision with language and her eye for social performance. The collection rewards attention to small gestures—a hesitation, a misplaced confidence—that signal larger failures of understanding. The stories do not offer resolutions so much as they sharpen the reader's awareness of the gap between appearance and reality, a gap that Wharton maps with both irony and sympathy.

Wharton’s people, forever chasing a truth they can’t quite see, remind me of another restless soul, Wollstonecraft’s Maria, who also found the world’s rules cold against her heart. Both books whisper the same old ache: how we long for genuine feeling, yet keep bumping into locked doors. I’ve held that quiet kinship for years now, like two faded letters. Maria; Or, The Wrongs of Woman — Reading Companion sits beside Wharton on my shelf, companions in that shared, wistful struggle.