http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-02-22/readers-review-ethan-frome-edith-wharton

Wharton’s 150th birthday is January 24th, just a few weeks away (she was an Aquarius, by the way). You might celebrate it at the Mount (http://www.edithwharton.org/), or curl up at home with one of your favorite Wharton works, or find a new one (http://www.amazon.com/Edith-Wharton/e/B00456E9BQ).

The Boston Globe writes this week that Wharton was just as much a bard of Western Massachusetts as a chronicler of New York high society: http://www.amazon.com/Edith-Wharton/e/B00456E9BQ.

Or perhaps, you can dream away the winter chill with thoughts of bella Italia. Look forward to seeing you in Firenze, six months hence.

best regards,

Meredith & Emily

Lev Raphael is a prize-winning author and reviewer who has published twenty books in genres from memoir to mystery. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and he has done hundreds of invited talks and readings from his books on three different continents, though this will be his first reading in Italy. Before he left academia in 1988 to write and review full-time, he was an assistant professor of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University where he earned his Ph.D. in American Studies. MSU has invited him back as a “distinguished author” to teach creative writing and MSU’s Libraries recently purchased his present and future literary papers for their archives.  Raphael has reviewed for NPR, The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and many other journals and magazines. Among his books is The Edith Wharton Murders, which the New York Times Book Review called “a maliciously funny campus mystery,” as well as a psychological study of Wharton’s life and fiction, Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame. Raphael was the first critic to apply shame to a reading of Wharton’s fiction, starting in the late 1980s with his articles on the then-ignored novellas The Touchstone and Sanctuary. He was also especial champion of Wharton’s later fiction like The Mother’s Recompense.  His latest novel Rosedale in Love tells the story of The House of Mirth from the perspective of Simon Rosedale and his family, blending characters from Wharton’s book, historical figures, and characters he created. The novel was inspired by decades of reading Wharton and by Wide Sargasso Sea and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Raphael’s web site is http://www.levraphael.com.

Jennie Fields was born in Chicago and raised in Highland Park, Illinois.  She received her master’s degree in creative writing from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.   Since then, she has published numerous stories and three novels: Lily Beach, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and The Middle Ages. Her latest book, presently titled The Age of Desire and based on the life of Edith Wharton, will be published by Viking in summer 2012.  The work focuses on Wharton’s life in the years 1907-1910. Fields has been a devoted Whartonphile since her early twenties, and returns to Wharton’s novels regularly for inspiration. For more information, see http://www.amazon.com/Age-Desire-Novel-Jennie-Fields/dp/067002368X.

Just a reminder that yesterday marked the deadline for registration for Edith Wharton in Florence. If you did not receive registration materials, please check your emails (we’ve learned that some materials may have been blocked by spam filters); if you did not receive registration paperwork, please contact either Emily (ejorlando@msn.com) or Meredith (mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) immediately, and we’ll get them right to you.

Happy New Year and best regards,
Meredith & Emily

Please pardon these unavoidable delays–registration forms are on their way and will be posted here and on the Edith Wharton Society website soon. We have extended our registration deadline until January 1, 2012. Currently, you may visit the EWS website if you wish to update your membership or pay your registration fees via PayPal. In the interim, please forward us any questions you have. Thank you for your patience; we look forward to seeing you in Florence!

Sincerely,

Meredith Goldsmith and Emily Orlando

Co-Directors, EW in Florence

I have just returned from a scouting visit to Scuola Lorenzo di Medici, Marist College’s campus in Florence, and I can tell you that they are rolling out the red carpet for Edith Wharton in Florence 2012. A brief update  on our progress: We are extending the registration deadline until December 15, and are in the process of putting a PayPal site together for those who wish to pay in that manner. If your paper was accepted, you will receive a welcome email from us soon with more detailed registration information. If you did not submit a paper but are interested in attending, please contact the conference organizers, Meredith Goldsmith (mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) and Emily Orlando (ejorlando@msn.com) and ask to be put on the list.

We also still check the edithwhartoninflorence2012@gmail.com, should you need to get in touch with us that way.

A final note: we received well over 100 proposals and were forced to turn away some that came in just a day or two after the deadline. For this reason, we are unable to entertain any more proposals at this time.

Questions? Please feel free to let us know.

Ciao, and best regards,

Meredith & Emily, EWinFlorence 2012

Campbell is associate professor of English at Washington State
University, where she has recently held the Buchanan Distinguished
Professorship (2007-2010).  Her work on Edith Wharton has focused on Wharton’s relationships to her American contemporaries and to American naturalism, including discussions of Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth in Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 (Ohio UP, 1997; Northeast MLA Book Prize, 1995).  Recent publications on Wharton include “Edith
Wharton’s ‘Book of the Grotesque’: Sherwood Anderson, Modernism, and the Late Stories” (Edith Wharton Review,
2010); “A Literary Expatriate: Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton, and the Politicsof a Literary Reputation” (Edith Wharton
Review, 2008); “Edith Wharton: Short Stories,” in A Companion to the American Short Story (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009);
“Where are the ladies? Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and American Women Naturalists” (Studies in American
Naturalism, 2006); and “The ‘bitter taste’ of Naturalism: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and David Graham
Phillips’s Susan Lenox” (Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on
American Literary Naturalism, 2003).  Other work includes “Edith Wharton and the ‘Authoresses: The Critique of Local Color in Wharton’s Early Fiction” (Studies in American Fiction, 1994),  an introduction to the Northeastern University Press edition of The Fruit of the Tree (2000), and an interview for The Secret Life of
Edith Wharton, a documentary to accompany Lucasfilm’s “Young Indy” DVD series reissue (2007).  She received the Edith Wharton Society Research Award in 2009 for her project, “Wharton and the Transnational Body: Gabrielle Landormy, Citizenship, and Modernity in the Late Works of Edith Wharton.” She currently holds an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship (2011) at the Lilly Library of Indiana University for “Cinema, Technology, and Modern Visual Culture in the Fiction of Edith Wharton,” and Wharton features prominently in all the chapters of her current book
project Bitter Tastes: Naturalism, Early Film, and American Women’s Writing. A past president of the Edith Wharton Society, she created its web site in 1999 and continues to serve as webmaster.

Please join us for the international conference of the Edith Wharton Society in Florence, Italy, celebrating the sesquicentennial of Wharton’s birth. “Edith Wharton in Florence” will be the third Wharton Society conference held in Europe and the first in Italy. The conference directors seek papers focusing on all aspects of Wharton’s work, and we especially welcome submissions dealing with the international contexts of her writing.

Papers might offer readings of any of Wharton’s texts, including the following:

• short fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and travel writing, in addition to the novels;
• Wharton’s work in relation to any of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts;
• Wharton in a transatlantic literary context;
• Wharton and her contemporaries, both male and female, canonical and non-canonical, European and American;
• Wharton in Italy, Morocco, and elsewhere in Europe;
• Wharton and the other arts, including painting, photography, theatre, and film (adaptations of her work during her lifetime and those that have appeared more recently);
• Wharton and cosmopolitanism, globalization, and the various forces of modernity;
• Wharton and art history.

All theoretical approaches welcome, including feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, marxist, queer, and ecocritical, among others.

Through the generosity of Marist College, the conference will be held at Marist’s Lorenzo di Medici campus, in the heart of Florence. In addition to panels, there will be a keynote speaker and opportunities for tours of the area. Conference venue: http://www.marist.edu/academics/italy/ldm.html
Please submit 250-500-word abstracts and brief CV to EdithWhartoninFlorence2012@gmail.com
by 15 July 2011.
All conference participants must be members of the Edith Wharton Society
at the time of registration.
For more information about the conference, contact Conference Directors
Meredith Goldsmith (Ursinus College; mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) and
Emily Orlando (Fairfield University; eorlando@fairfield.edu).