Continuing The Custom of the Country

There were two Edith Whartons, the grand New York lady ('every inch a lady,' says Anita Brookner in her Introduction to The Custom of the Country), and the artistic, almost bohemian European: we see something of the latter in action in the novel, when Undine and Ralph are on their honeymoon in Italy, Switzerland and Paris. '[S]trange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the watering-place world' - the Baroness Adelschein, who is tolerated because she is amusing but would be dropped at home, and the 'Parisianized' Mrs Shallum and her 'wax-featured' husband. Such figures point towards The Age of Innocence and Ellen Olenska, who knows that world too well, and realises it is no place for Newland Archer.

Brookner's Continent was altogether less raffish. She went to the same sorts of places, but gone were the louche outcasts of society Wharton depicts. And they're surely gone now. Go to Switzerland now, and you'll find only the super-rich. In Brookner there are hints of past times, in the guests at the Hotel du Lac in the novel of that name, or in Fanny Bauer and her mother in Nyon in The Next Big Thing.

Brookner hasn't been the only critic to deplore the lack of classic novels about marriage, in contrast with the very many about courtship. Wharton is an exception, in her depiction of Undine and Ralph's marriage. As Brookner says:

As long as men and women seek to use each other - and to use each other badly - Edith Wharton can be counted upon to provide the ideal commentary.

And indeed Wharton is unsparing in her portrait of a marriage on the skids, the obsession with money, the moments of anger, the compromises, the concessions, the mercies. But it is also her business to show a changing culture, the modern world coming on. Undine, marrying into minor New York aristocracy, 'found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous'.

Wharton's Collected Stories, another
Brookner-curated volume (1988)