Perhaps the most striking thing about Edith Wharton 's reputation as a novelist is the fact that she has been "reclaimed" so many times. This fact seems all the more remarkable when one reflects that before her death in 1937, her novels and short stories were consistent best-sellers, while at the same time they won widespread critical acclaim. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for The Age of Innocence, and several of her novels, Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, and The Old Maid, were successfully adapted for the Broadway stage; Zoe Akin's dramatization of Ethan Frome itself won a Pulitzer Prize in 1935. Yet after her death, Wharton's reputation declined rapidly. Her work seemed dated, perhaps because she employed few of the experimental forms of narration that such writers as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf had begun to explore with such dazzling success.

The popular image of Wharton herself...