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expand1996 (1)
1Author:  Wharton review: AnonymousRequires cookie*
 Title:  Ethan Frome  
 Published:  1996 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text 
 Description: More than ten years ago Mrs. Wharton published a short story called «The Duchess at Prayer.» Since that time we have cherished an estimate of her powers which no intermediate accession to her repertory has raised, nor even, to speak truth, quite justified. Practised, cosmopolitan, subtle, she has seemed, on the whole, to covet most earnestly the refinements of Henry James. In spite of her habit of a franker approach, her consistent rating of matter above manner, and the gravitation — we should hesitate to say transfer — of her interest from exotic to native themes; we might have been reasonably content to rank her as the greatest pupil of a little master, were it not for the appearance of «Ethan Frome.» This startling fulfilment recalls not only the promise of the early story, but its revelation of a more potent influence — the inspiriting example of a greater novelist to whom Mr. James's devoirs have been paid in the phrase, «The master of us all.» Exactly how much the inception and execution of «The Duchess at Prayer» owed to Balzac's «La grande Breteche» is beyond our present point, which is, specifically, that the excellence of Mrs. Wharton's work in this case outstripped the charge of imitation, and allied her with that company of splendid talents whom neither magnificence nor the catastrophes of passion can abash.
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