Edith Ugly Wharton

From Incredibly, I Was Even Gayer at 21:

journal entry 

December 31, 1993
I just finished Ethan Frome and right now I've got so much energy I'm about to burst, I am breathless with excitement -  Zeena kept Mattie because why? I believe she knew about her and Ethan, so I think she simply felt that because of Ethan's face, she was no longer a threat. Maybe. Or maybe she just didn't know or care. But all of a sudden, she had strength. First she let her health confine him, then she let his own do it. What a great book.

In the same manner as with loving Born in the USA without it occurring to me to listen to other Bruce records for over a decade I can't believe that as much as I loved Ethan Frome, I've never read any other Edith Wharton.  I recommended The House of Mirth for my book club, but it didn't get picked (yet.)

Jonathan Franzen has an article in The New Yorker that shows her as the worst person in the world and, even worse, fugly:

No major American novelist has led a more privileged life than Wharton did. Although she was seldom entirely free of money worries, she always lived as if she were. To be rich like Wharton may be what all of us secretly or not so secretly want, but privilege like hers isn’t easy to like; it puts her at a moral disadvantage. She was deeply conservative, opposed to socialism, unions, and woman suffrage, intellectually attracted to the relentless world view of Darwinism, hostile to the rawness and noise and vulgarity of America. Her biographers supply this signal image of the artist at work: writing in bed after breakfast and tossing the completed pages on the floor, to be sorted and typed up by her secretary. Wharton did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage: she wasn’t pretty....An odd thing about beauty, however, is that its absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do. To the contrary, Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if, alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy; and nobody was more conscious of this capacity of beauty to override our resentment of privilege than Wharton herself. At the center of each of her three finest novels is a female character of great beauty, chosen deliberately to complicate the problem of sympathy. 

When Dee Dee Bowler fell while running the shuttle run in 4th grade we all laughed so hard Mr. Futchko sent us back to homeroom and made us put our heads down for the rest of class (oooooooooooooooooooooohhh, scary!)  Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that if Libby Sill, the Norma Jean Bissell of our class, had taken such a tumble we would've run over each other in the mad scramble to help her up, sprinting to the cafeteria for hot water and towels.  Shit ain't fair.