“What’s the child looking at,” asked Miss Weatherwax?“Oh, everything!,” said Alice. “It’s all so beautiful!…If you’ve never seen it before, you ought to take a long, long look. You’ll never see it just this way again.”…said the little old American woman, “That’s right, I’ll never see it again for the first time, will I? Well, …
Continue reading Madamoiselle Misfortune, Carol Ryrie Brink (1935)
The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop and content with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had once imagined it would be…and it was long since their hopes had soared higher. Edith Wharton is known for her sharp observations about the excesses of the upper classes and expats of …
The mother had wished to prevent the father,…from ‘so much as looking at the child;’ the father’s plea was that the mother’s lightest touch was ‘simply contamination.’ These were the opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated….Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited …
They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…. If I didn’t feel obligated to read this book for Jazz Age June, I probably would …
Continue reading The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
He knew on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserable a girl like Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and whims. It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked they so often had to do what they disliked. Nick …
Continue reading The Glimpses of the Moon, Edith Wharton (1922)
The land belongs to the future….We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while. O Pioneers! tells the story of the Scandinavian, Bohemian and French immigrants who settled in the Nebraska prairies during the turn of …
Father: The principal thing that we know about this young man—leads us to suppose that, however much he may value your personal merits, he values your money more….If Morris Townsend has spent his own fortune in amusing himself, there is every reason to believe that he would spend yours. Daughter: That is not the principal …
Ralph Marvell: You know nothing of this society you’re in; of its antecedents, its rules, its conventions; and it’s my affair to look after you, and warn you when you’re on the wrong track. Undine: I don’t believe an American woman needs to know such a lot about their old rules. They can see I …
Continue reading The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton (1913)
“What has she been doing?”“Everything that is not done here. Flirting with any man she could pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o’clock at night.” Published in 1878, Daisy Miller is one of Henry James’s early works. It foreshadows his reputation …
And Madame de Treymes has left her husband? Ah, no, poor creature: they don’t leave their husbands—they can’t. Madame de Treymes, published in 1907, is Wharton’s first work after The House of Mirth. As one of the themes in most of her fiction, this novella is very much concerned with the male/female dynamic around marriage. …
Classic Laurie 