Edith Wharton

And we just love a makeover plot, too, which is so American.

Yeah, I think it tickles this need for American myth that even those of us who really despise such myths, even those of us who read Edith Wharton, you know, Edith Wharton is an outright radical compared to the Gilded Age.

Right.

You know what happens in the age of innocence? Shunning, heartbreak, misery, a society that is sclerotic and about to collapse.

I think the show is, the show, I think something else may be going on, or something like in conjunction to that may be going on.

Because there are many sharper-eyed works from the time that reflect the real horrors of this kind of society, this social stratification that we continue to read and love as classics because they feel so contemporary.

Because Edith Wharton novels do show us something about the way we live today and the way that class continues to operate in America, or maybe the way it doesn't particularly, but did at one time.

We talk a lot on the show about The Custom of the Country, a great novel that is, I mean, I think like if there were three novels to recommend for understanding the United States, that should definitely.

I mean, it was really fascinating because they did call it the wedding breakfast.

Edith Wharton refers to it in Age of Innocence.

And Mrs. Mingott is very proud of the fact that she's going to throw the wedding breakfast.

I mean, whoever threw it, that was a place of honor, too, right? Or a position of honor.

But, you know, interestingly, Cuba comes up.

It does.

You know, Edith Wharton writes about the fact that her parents and this is in the 1840s, they actually took their honeymoon to Cuba.

That's right.

Poetry always kind of brings out the pictures for me.

And I found a poem by Edith Wharton called La Belgique.

And what I knew about her was she was a mythology kind of expert that at least that's what I thought.

And maybe I'm wrong about that, but I read the poem and it occurred to me when I read the poem, I was like, was Belgium occupied at some point? Like, and it was, it was like under the rule of France first and then the Netherlands.

We discussed this film.

It's a novel written by Edith Wharton, who is an American woman who wrote books.

And it was published.

It's her eighth novel.

brainless, I suppose.

In 1934, there's a sound version with Irene Dunn, which does exist and you can watch it, but it was a flop and I think it's not considered very good.

Edith Wharton then went ahead and died in 1937.

Rude.

They all used to, like the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, they all used to have homes in Newport, Rhode Island, which is the mansion walk.

So we actually did our first interview with Penny in Edith Wharton's old mansion on the cliff walk because she was working for the guy that owned it.

So, you know, the whole...

The mansions in

Arguably, there is a little snobbery around them now, but some of the greatest writers turned their talents to ghost stories, both in the Irish tradition, but further afield as well.

By further afield, I mean people like Henry James, And Edith Wharton.

Edith Wharton was an American Gilded Age writer who famously said, I don't believe in ghosts, but I'm afraid of them.

And I'm with her on that.

I mean, Poe, Hawthorne Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Balzac, all wrote ghost stories.