![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Parsons-Image-A-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library<\/p><\/div>\n
3 June \u2013 Heaven under surveillance
\nInside the Beinecke cream-coloured carpet muffles sound, black leather-backed chairs surround generous desks, and Gertrude Stein looks down from the wall.<\/p>\n
The manuscript for The Age of Innocence<\/em><\/a> is being scanned off-site, so I move straight on to A Backward Glance<\/em>. I note Wharton inserting the phrase \u2018secret lisp\u2019 to describe the sound of arbutus buds in the spring woods near Mamaroneck.[2] Then she adds the word \u2018secret\u2019 to describe her reading practice as \u2018a secret ecstasy of communion\u2019, before explaining why she\u2019s chosen this particular adjective.[3] Understanding dawns \u2013 Wharton is saying that she attaches value to concealment, in an autobiography that is noticeably reticent.<\/p>\n 4 June \u2013 Hunting for silences in The Reef<\/em> 5 June \u2013 Wharton writes women [\u2026] are remarkable beings indeed, a bitter girl and a tarnished old man; [\u2026] he is a really rich piece of creation, a masterful louche<\/em>, obscurely battered and defeated derelict of his world; he does not, one feels, get all the display he should have had.[7]<\/p>\n But the evolution from manuscript to published text makes clear that this story is not about Royall. Wharton wants us to empathise with the girl!<\/p>\n 6\u20137 June \u2013 Wharton\u2019s war Judging by Roosevelt\u2019s letters, he and Wharton egged each other on over American neutrality. Conrad\u2019s letters unexpectedly gentle; it is 1 October 1917 and his son has just visited from the front. Then Bo Rhinelander\u2019s excitement over getting into the thick of things with his \u2018D H 4 with a 420 h.p. Liberty Motor\u2019, envy of the English pilots, is palpable in a September 1918 letter to his mother, Wharton\u2019s cousin by marriage.[8]<\/p>\n Philip Newbold Rhinelander (1895\u20131918) [9]<\/p><\/div>The last is a difficult read. Within weeks Bo\u2019s plane is shot down, and Wharton calls on her impressive network to determine his fate. 10 June \u2013 Secrets revealed Delve into Henry James<\/a>\u2019 letters, but his handwriting defies me. Call it a day and get soaked on the way home. Sandals squelching, inspiration strikes; look for Powers\u2019 volume of James-Wharton correspondence on Internet Archive\u00a0<\/a> to work out which of James\u2019 letters are not published, and focus on those!<\/p>\n 11\u201312 June \u2013 The Wharton marriage Then it\u2019s early 1914; Wharton sends Lapsley postcards from North Africa containing what can only be described as toilet humour. Stifle my laughter with enormous effort. At the next desk scholars sombrely examine medieval manuscripts.<\/p>\n 13 June \u2013 Paper trail of a life Swallowing hard again, now over diary entries for Berry\u2019s death, and maids Elise and Gross\u2019s.<\/p>\n 14 June \u2013 Time passes Edith Wharton to Morton Fullerton, 19 October 1907 [13]<\/p><\/div>Back up my notes and photographs one more time, yet resist closing my laptop and returning the last folder to the front desk. How lucky to be of a generation with access to the words and images that today signify Wharton. Sit a while longer, thinking how ten days have wiped away the years between her life and mine.<\/p>\n Notes<\/em> By Isabelle Parsons, PhD student, English Literature (1) It\u2019s a Monday morning in June and I\u2019m standing in front of the imposing granite and marble cube that is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I\u2019ve spent … Continue reading
\nSophy\u2019s manifesto-like exclamation, \u2018\u201cI wanted it\u2013\u2013I chose it. He was good to me\u2013\u2013no one ever was so good!\u2019\u201d, where every pause drives home her certainty, is absent from the manuscript.[4] And the narrative leaps from Anna learning about Darrow and Sophy\u2019s past, to a chapter I don\u2019t recognise from the published text, one where she wakes up \u2018an hour or two before dawn, got up and threw open the shutters of the bedroom windows. The intense silence of a muffled sky hung in the woods and fields.\u2019[5] This<\/em>, then, is transmission history in action, showing me Wharton\u2019s creative mind at work.<\/p>\n
\nLawyer Royall says something extraordinary in the manuscript of Summer<\/em>, omitted from the final text: \u201cEvery thing I\u2019ve done in my life\u2019s been a failure,\u201d he broke out suddenly \u2013\u2013 \u201cand now I\u2019ve made a failure of this too.\u201d\u2019[6] The next folder I open includes the view of The Literary Supplement of the London Times<\/em> (1917), which finds that Royall and his ward<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Parsons-Image-B-e1564575958692-300x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\nRequest scan of Wharton\u2019s talk to American soldiers \u2013 in Paris? \u2013 despite pages missing from document. Her warmth & Francophilia unmistakeable.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Bo-Rhinelander-1.jpg\")
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\nUnexpectedly discomfited by Morton Fullerton\u2019s clandestine transcription of ‘Terminus’. Wharton destroyed the original, yet I have in front of me her intimate thoughts about a love affair that delighted and then agonised her.<\/p>\n
\nAcrimony of the Wharton separation emerges. In December 1912 she writes to Gaillard Lapsley, \u2018I\u2019ve been going through bad times. Teddy [Edward Wharton] is in London, in the clutches of a woman, + I can do nothing. Try not to see him, please. He is pursuing all my friends.\u2019[10] Sixteen months later Lapsley hears, \u2018[\u2026] I \u201cget my decree\u201d in another four or five days. I find that Teddy has registered all his various temporary brides as \u201cMrs Wharton\u201d in the hotels they frequented \u2013\u2013 rather a gratuitous last touch of ill-breeding.\u2019[11]<\/p>\n
\nWharton\u2019s 1920 diary tracks Age of Innocence<\/em>\u2019s relentless progress, and shows Walter Berry moonlighting as her New York courier, hand delivering to Appleton the novel\u2019s completed chapters as sent to him.<\/p>\n
\nPhotograph 1938 letter from Yale president Charles Seymour to Lapsley regarding gift of Wharton\u2019s papers. Confirms willingness to provide \u2018careful housing and protection\u2019, \u2018that the correspondence and biographical material will not be accessible for a period of years, roughly corresponding to a generation\u2019, and that Wharton\u2019s manuscripts \u2018will be accessible only to bona fide students of literature and that none of the unpublished material be published until the copyright expires\u2019. He agrees also to \u2018the necessity of guarding against the danger that the material might fall into incompetent or unwise hands in the meantime\u2019.[12]<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Letter-to-Fullerton-1907-682x1024.jpg\")
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\n1. Isabelle Parsons is an Associate Lecturer and doctoral student in English at The Open University. Her visit to the Beinecke Library in June 2019 was funded through an Edith Wharton Society Award for Archival Research and The Open University\u2019s PRA and RESSF schemes.
\n2. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series I, Box 2, \u2028Folder 27.
\n3. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series I, Box 2, \u2028Folder 28.
\n4. Edith Wharton, The Reef<\/em> (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p.263.
\n5. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series I, Box 11, \u2028Folder 320.
\n6. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series I, Box 12, \u2028Folder 362.
\n7. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series I, Box 12, \u2028Folder 363.
\n8. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series II, Box 30, \u2028Folder 916.
\n9. James W.D. Seymour, Memorial volume of the American Field Service in France: \u201cFriends of France\u201d 1914-1917<\/em> (Boston: American Air Service, 1921), n.p.
\n10. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series VII, Box 59, \u2028Folder 1706.
\n11. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series VII, Box 59, \u2028Folder 1707.
\n12. Beinecke Rare Book \u2028and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAL MSS 42, Series XI, Box 65, \u2028Folder 1795.
\n13. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, YCAK MSS 42, Series II, Box 25, Folder 774.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"