Jennifer Haytock is the author of At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (2003), Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (2008), The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women's Novels in the 1930s (2013), and The Routledge Introduction to American War Literature (2018). Laura Rattray is Reader in American Literature and Director of the Centre of American Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her work on Wharton includes Edith Wharton in Context (Cambridge, 2012), The Unpublished Writings of Edith Wharton (2009) and the Oxford World Classics edition of Summer (2015).

'… the best of these essays point toward a rejuvenation of the old in ways that allow Wharton fans to gain a deeper understanding of this complex and often misunderstood woman and artist.' S. Batcos, Choice

• 1. Introduction Jennifer Haytock and Laura Rattray; Part I. Self and Composition: 2. Creative process and literary form in Edith Wharton's archive Paul Ohler; 3. Wharton's letters: glimpses of the whole Edith Wharton Julie Olin-Ammentorp; 4. Edith Wharton and the business of the magazine short story Sarah Whitehead; Part II. International Wharton: 5. Edith Wharton's odyssey Myrto Drizou; 6. Edith Wharton's French engagement Virginia Ricard; 7. Edith Wharton and transnationalism Donna Campbell; Part III. Wharton on the Margins: 8. Edith Wharton's unprivileged lives Laura Rattray; 9. Wharton, insurance culture, and pain management Jennifer Travis; 10. Edith Wharton's humanimal pity Shannon Brennan; 11. Edith Wharton and the writing of whiteness Jennifer Haytock; Part IV. Sex and Gender Revisited: 12. Women, art, and the natural world in Edith Wharton's works Gary Totten; 13. Wharton and the romance plot Linda Wagner-Martin; 14. Masculine modernity: fathers, sons, and generational absolution in Wharton's fiction Melanie Dawson; 15. Wharton's wayward girls Meredith Goldsmith.