Here we have a high-concept novel that asks us to suspend disbelief in order to play along. It’s a novella – catchily titled Following in the Footsteps of Edith Wharton – that his modern-day company are planning to publish, and he’s pilfered it for Wharton to bless or burn. Another of the lit-dead, publisher Charles Scribner, has provided a manuscript for Wharton to read aloud to the assembly. The ghost who’s not in the room, but increasingly the topic of conversation, is Edwardian cad Morton Fullerton, a journalist on the make, and promiscuous lover – of a family member, landlady, British lords, and Wharton herself, in passionate middle age.Īll of the above have been dead for many decades for Teddy Wharton, it’s almost a century. It’s another woman writer of the early twentieth century, a sometime fan and rival, who’s there to spoil the fun. The final guest Wharton finds hard to place: memory is misty in the afterlife. In his place we get a British couple from the Jamesian set, critic Percy Lubbock and his ‘black widow’ wife Sybil: Lubbock was Wharton’s one-time protégé but has betrayed her in book form, as she will discover. Her waspish niece (and famous landscape architect) Trix Farrand is there, to report on events up to her own death in 1959. ![]() Three preceded Wharton in death: Walter Berry, lawyer and diplomat, and her closest friend blustering Teddy Wharton, her ex-husband and Linky, her last dog. The Night of All Souls opens with Wharton coming to in a book-lined room with bad lighting and comfortable chairs: this is the afterlife, and she is joined by some familiar, if uninvited, companions. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, and Women in Love by D.H. (Her Pulitzer-winning novel, The Age of Innocence, was set in the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1870s but was published in 1920, the same year as F. Her career as a fiction writer is resolutely twentieth century, stretching between the presidencies of her friend Teddy Roosevelt and FDR, though her fame as a chronicler of ‘old’ New York means some might mistake her for an earlier writer. She spent much of her adult life in Europe, a cultural exile she embraced. Wharton was best known as a prolific fiction writer, publishing over 40 novels, novellas and story collections to both literary acclaim and commercial success. ![]() Wharton’s first book, published in 1897 when she was 35 years old, was The Decoration of Houses, and Italian Villas and their Gardens, published in 1904, was highly influential – and still in print. She shares a passion for gardening and landscape with the protagonist of her novel, Edith Wharton, one of the major American novelists of the early twentieth century, and the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Swan is better known as a journalist and nonfiction writer, the author of Life (and Death) In A Small City Garden (2001). This is the central question of The Night of All Souls, the first novel by Wellington writer Philippa Swan. ‘But is it possible to embarrass the dead?’ ‘It is impossible to libel the dead legal protection of reputation stops at the grave,’ wrote Judith Martin – aka Miss Manners – in The New York Times in 2012.
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