Starting with the tensions in the early family constellation, Gloria C. Erlich traces Edith Wharton's erotic evolution-from her early repression of sexuality and her celibate marriage to her discovery of passion in a rapturous midlife love affair with the bisexual Morton Fullerton. Analyzing the novelist's life, letters, and fiction, Erlich reveals several interrelated identity systems-the filial, the sexual, and the creative-that evolved together over the course of Wharton's lifetime.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993.
Starting with the tensions in the early family constellation, Gloria C. Erlich traces Edith Wharton's erotic evolution-from her early repression of sexuality and her celibate marriage to her discovery of passion in a rapturous midlife love affair with the