Edith Wharton was born 163 years ago today, on January 24, 1862, in New York City. I’ve been rereading her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1933), enjoying her descriptions of the books she read when she was young. Forbidden to read a novel without her mother’s permission, she writes that the “wide expanse of the classics, English, French and German” stretched before her instead, and she “plunged at will” into “that sea of wonders.”

Wharton says, “I was a healthy little girl who loved riding, swimming and romping; yet no children of my own age, and none even among the nearest of my grown-ups, were as close to me as the great voices that spoke to me from books.” She didn’t discuss this friendship with books and authors with anyone else: “There was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude, or at least no one whom I had yet encountered.”

I’ve also been reading/rereading articles on Wharton, including an essay from a couple of years ago by Emily J. Orlando, who writes of Wharton’s “uncanny anticipation of our culture,” suggesting that she “seems to have foreseen the excesses, obsessions, and spectacles of our current moment.”

I like Emily Temple’s tribute to Wharton and dogs, which includes details about Wharton’s dog cemetery; her dog ghost story, “Kerfol”; the poetry she wrote about dogs; and her work as an animal activist. Wharton wrote of her “deep, instinctive understanding of animals,” and believed she could communicate with her dogs. After her dog Linky died in 1937, she told a friend that “no one had such wise things to say as Linky.”

Here are a couple of other things I’ve come across recently, from my friends Shawna Lemay and Renée Hartleib, and saved to share with you.

Shawna says in a blog post that “Art helps, art is needed, art is necessary. Art is non-negotiable if we’re to get through.” Quoting a famous passage from Henry James’s story “The Middle Years,” in which the novelist Dencombe speaks of “work[ing] in the dark,” she writes that “we’re always working in the dark. We never know quite what will happen next. Still life reminds us to stay. Breathe. Attend. . . . Don’t give up. Don’t stop.”

(Shawna wrote “Of Sandwiches and Obligations” for my Sense and Sensibility blog series last summer.)

Those of you who are engaged in a writing project (or may be considering embarking on one) might be interested in a new program Renée’s offering, the Short Story Intensive. (If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, perhaps you’ll remember the guest post she wrote on “Words that Heal” in 2023.) In the Short Story Intensive, Renée’s “aim is to help writers take a short piece of fiction, poetry, or memoir to the next level, and one step closer to publication.” She says, “I love working one-on-one with writers and this new offering is short, simple, personal, and affordable.”

I’m sending you all best wishes for good conversations with books, pets, and artists—past, present, and future. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you here next Friday.

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Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:

Unexpectedly Austen (a series of tributes to Jane Austen on the JASNA website, co-edited by Liz Philosophos Cooper and me)

“I bought maps in every town” (Nashville photos and Ann Patchett’s first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars)

Read more about my books, including St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.