Edith Wharton's Letters From the Underworld: Fictions of Women and Writing

In this book, Candace Waid presents an innovative reading of the work of Edith Wharton. Waid examines Wharton’s lifelong preoccupation with the place of the American woman writer, which she locates in the context of Wharton’s ambivalent reaction to America and American literature. She argues that Wharton used the myth of Persephone to represent both the woman artist and her identification with the daughter who leaves the world of mother to dwell in the “underworld” of experience.

Waid offers...