Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for 2023: Josephine Saxton

Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for 2023: Josephine Saxton

I am a member of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award Jury. The award is intended to recognize a writer of particular merit who has, for whatever reason, fallen to some extent out of the public eye. Usually this means a writer who is either deceased, or who has not published for a significant period. The other members of the jury are Ann VanderMeer, Steven H Silver, and Grant Thiessen. The award is presented at Readercon, a long-running convention in the Boston area devoted to written SF and Fantasy. For 2023 we selected Josephine Saxton.

Saxton was born Josephine Mary Howard in 1935 in Halifax in Yorkshire, England. She began publishing in 1965, as Josephine Saxton, with "The Wall", in Science Fantasy. Over the next several years she published a number of stories, largely in F&SF, though some appeared in anthologies like England Swings SF, Stopwatch, Alchemy and Academe, Orbit, and Again, Dangerous Visions. Her first three novels, beginning with The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, came out from Doubleday in the US between 1969 and 1971. One more novel, Queen of the States, appeared in 1986. Two books about a character named Jane Saint showed up in 1986 and 1989, each comprising a short novel or novella and some stories (the latter not necessarily about Jane Saint.) The collections The Power of Time and Little Tours of Hell, were published in 1985 and 1986, the first collecting most of her early stories, the second a set of short horror pieces. Since 1989 her only book has been a nonfiction work on gardening. Saxton is still alive, now 88 years old.

This body of work, though fairly small, is quite remarkable, and thoroughly original. She does not typically present a coherent science fictional or fantasy "world" -- instead, we see utterly strange happenings that either represent in some sense the characters' internal state of mind or thematically symbolize what's going on. I think it's fair to say that for many readers this is a problem. For me, I find myself completely enchanted by Saxton's prose, and by her imagination. Her novels draw you into their worldview if you let them, they take you on an unexpected journey, and they can be truly powerful. I don't think she exactly fit anywhere generically -- she was fortunate to find in the SF scene of the mid-60s a receptive editorial audience. She seemed to fit within the English New Wave, but she never appeared in New Worlds -- most of her early work was published in the US. I think, really, she is sui generis.

I have reviewed three of her novels, Vector for Seven (my personal favorite), The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, and Queen of the States. Here are the reviews:

Vector for Seven

The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith/Queen of the States.

Ann VanderMeer and I represented the jury at Readercon this year. We gave the following announcement of our selection: 

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award jury have selected Josephine Saxton for the 2023 Award. Ms. Saxton's first story, "The Wall", appeared in Science Fantasy in 1965. She has since published dozens of short stories including "The Consciousness Machine", "The Power of Time", and "Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon"; as well as the novels The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, Vector for Seven, Group Feast, Queen of the States; and the Jane Saint stories, comprising two short novels and several related stories. Her fiction is as original as any writer we know, marrying a striking almost surrealistic imagination with a fiercely feminist yet wholly personal viewpoint. She is like no other writer, and a writer whose work is as fresh now, three decades since her last short story appeared, as it was when she emerged in the mid 1960s.

Ann then read the opening of a brand new story from Josephine Saxton, the first from her in some 30 years, that showed that even in her 80s she retains her ability.

I hope contemporary readers seek out Saxton's work -- it is challenging, yes, but extremely rewarding, exciting, and as I've said, wholly individual. Most of her work is available in ebook form from Gateway Orion.

Resurrected Review: Spotted Lily, by Anna Tambour

Resurrected Review: Spotted Lily, by Anna Tambour

In honor of her new 2023 story collection, Death Goes to the Dogs, I'm resurrecting a review I did back in 2005 of Anna Tambour's first novel, Spotted Lily. I'll get to Death Goes to the Dogs sometime, mind! (And I'm assured that despite the cover illustration, it is not really a horror collection.) Anna herself is truly one of the most individual voices in our field, and this was clear right from her start.

Anna Tambour's first novel is funny, moving, and true. At the open it seems set to be a satirical account of a somewhat aimless young woman's deal with the devil, and as such it is funny enough. But along the way -- or more probably, from the start, did we but know it -- it becomes an affecting look at an Australian woman's discovery of herself. Oh, and a love story too. With plenty of erotic imagery -- but with most of the actual eroticism suppressed.

Angela Pendergast is a 30ish Australian woman who has moved from her family's ranch in the bush to the big city. She wants to be a Writer, specifically a Bestselling Writer, but she finds it hard to actually get down to writing her Novel. Put simply, she wants to Have Written, not to write. She has a part-time job at a New Age bookstore, and she lives in a house with a few roommates.

Then the Devil shows up. He wants to be the new roomer -- but more than that, he offers her a deal. He'll write her Novel, a guaranteed bestseller. In exchange, of course, for the usual.

So far, so relatively normal. But both Angela and the Devil, whom she names Brett Hartshorn, aren't quite such simple characters. Soon Brett is immersing himself in human literature, trying to decide what makes a bestseller. (Before too long he lights on Barbara Cartland, and who can argue?) Meanwhile Angela is being remade as a glamorous Author, which amounts to accepting her curviness as loveliness, and to abandoning herself to the ministrations of a couple of fashion advisers. Which is a bad description of that portion of the book -- the "advisers" aren't conventionally portrayed at all, and Angela (now called Desirée Lily) is quite a different "Author".

But the book has further twists and turns. It seems what the Devil wants, and for that matter what Angela wants, isn't quite as clearcut as we might have thought. Never is the next plot development what we expect, as Angela learns more and more about things she has ignored, as she indeed becomes a bestselling author, in a very surprising and funny way, and as the Devil, indeed, is delivered his promised soul.

Inevitably one of the things Angela really needs is to return home, to come to an accommodation with the bush she left, with the parents she left. And, finally, she needs to come to one more accommodation -- another striking surprise!

Spotted Lily is quite an impressive debut. Perhaps most of all it is a very funny book, without being what you would call a comedy. It is also a believable and complete portrait of a woman. It is very surprising, and refreshingly so. I thought perhaps the need to always be original led to a bit of a strain for effect right at the close -- I admit I expected a slightly different, more conventional resolution, and I'm not quite sure the final twist really works -- but it's completely honest to the spirit of the book. Anna Tambour, on the strength of Spotted Lily and her earlier story collection, Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales &, is one of the most delightful, original, and varied new writers on hand.

Review: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

Review: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

by Rich Horton

This is Cassandra Khaw's first full-length novel (I think -- there have been several novella-length chapbooks.) I have been intrigued by their work for a while, particularly after reading the 2019 story "Mighty are the Meek and the Myriad", which I included in my Best of the Year volume, so I was anticipating this book. Khaw is a Malaysian writer and game designer, and most of their work has a distinct horror slant. That includes this novel -- even though it is pure SF.

This novel is primarily told from the POV of Maya, a profane woman working for (and obsessively in love with) Rita, who seems to be the leader of a group of space-based criminals which has fallen apart after the death of one of them, Johanna, some 40 years before. And now Rita is trying to get the gang back together, for (of course (sigh)) one last mission. The nature of the mission -- and, indeed, the nature of the gang, and of this future, are largely for the novel to reveal. Indeed, from the beginning, the reader is thrown into a world with little in the way of guideposts, little in the way of back story, and has to piece things together as things go on.

Rita and Maya, for the first half or more of the novel, keep trying to convince former members of the gang to rejoin them, mainly to help save Elise, one of their number who had physically died but managed to escape into the "Conversation", where the AIs who seem to dominate this multiple star system polity communicate. Some of their number agree to rejoin -- all reluctant, all for the same reasons -- distrust of Rita, especially over the loss of Johanna. Others turn out to be dead -- really dead. But over time a sort of quorum assembles -- and they head to the mysterious planet Dimmurborgir.

But I've skipped some stuff. For one thing, there is another major character, an AI named Pimento. Pimento is, I think, the most sympathetic character in the novel -- he is subservient to another AI, the Merchant Mind, but he seems to want to gain agency of his own. For another thing, there is Elise, who has her own POV chapters, as she tries to maintain her identity free from the searching AIs. And there are questions about the true natures of Rita and Maya and company -- it seems they are clones, who can be re-instantiated (mostly) after death, and reloaded, as it were, with their preserved consciousness. And clones are second -- or third -- class people in this future. 

All this is super promising, really. But, I fear, it never wholly coheres. To some extent, this is me complaining that I didn't understand this future well enough -- perhaps that's my fault (but I know I'm not alone!) To some extent, this is a Maya problem -- though there are several POV characters, Maya has by far the biggest share of the narrative, and she's kind of, well, boring -- just a constantly swearing fighter, with not much in the way of a third dimension. More Pimento, and more Elise, I think, would be good. In addition, the opening half of the book comes off rather padded -- continuing "shampoo, rinse, repeat" of tracking down another character, convincing her to rejoin the gang, getting rebuffed, guilting her via Elise to overcome her resistance ... even though each of these characters are supposed to be different from each other, this doesn't fully come off. One further weakness is the fuzziness of detail of the -- let's say, geography (or astrography) of this future. How does one get from one system to another? How many systems are there? How many planets? Cities? Moons? It wouldn't take much space to sketch these details in -- and it would really clarify a lot of, well, structure. For this reader, at least.

I will say that the novel's ending is pretty strong -- the final fate of the characters is pretty cool. But I wish it were a bit more earned. The novel needed to be either 30,000 words shorter, and simpler, or 20,000 words longer (or, better, 20,000 words longer with 40,000 new words and 20,000 cut) -- and in so doing, more fully develop the really cool ideas -- the role of AI in this future, and the position of clones, mainly; while tamping down the eventually somewhat repetitious violence, and repetitious voice.

I sound harsh, and I don't mean to be quite so down on the book. I don't think it works, but I did read it, and quickly. It lagged a bit at times, but never enough to make want to stop. The prose is inconsistent, but at its best is excellent -- original, sharp, energetic. And there are ideas behind it that I really liked -- I just don't think they were brought to life enough. In the end, I'll call this a promising first novel, with first novel problems, but which still marks its author as a writer to watch. 

Resurrected Review: The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker

Time to resurrect another old review, this one from my SFF.net newsgroup back in 2003. Kage Baker began publishing SF (and Fantasy) in the late '90s, and made an immediate mark, first with her Company stories (about a time traveling group of people), but eventually with stories in numerous series. She won a Nebula in 2010 for Best Novella ("The Woman of Nell Gwynne's".) Alas, she died of cancer, aged only 57, that same year. The review below is unchanged from what I wrote in 2003.

The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker

Tor, New York, NY, August 2003, 350 pages, Hardcover, US$25.95, ISBN:0-765-30818-5

a review by Rich Horton

Kage Baker is mostly known for her Company series, comprising to date several novels and quite a few short stories, the latter mostly but not exclusively from Asimov's. But she has begun to publish a few non-Company stories. One of these appeared in Asimov's in 2001, a huge novella, almost 36,000 words, called "The Caravan From Troon". She has now expanded the novella into a novel, called The Anvil of the World.

The expansion has been done fairly simply by adding two more novellas, of roughly similar length, to the original one. (A quick check suggests that "The Caravan From Troon" is all but unchanged as the first section of The Anvil of the World.) The novellas are closely linked, featuring the same cast of characters, and following on each other sequentially.

In "The Caravan From Troon", a mysterious man named Smith, who had come to Troon to escape the wrath of the family of someone he had killed (his previous job was assassin), is assigned to lead a caravan from the agricultural city Troon to the seaside town of Salesh. The caravan must pass through the mountains controlled by the Demon called the Master of the Mountain, and also through the territory of the mostly pacifistic Yendri, or "greenies", forest dwelling folk who sometimes erupt in resentment at the technological ways of humans (or as they are called "Children of the Sun"). (It should be noted that Children of the Sun, Yendri, and demons are physiologically similar and each species is interfertile with the others, which turns out to be critical to the plot in a number of ways.) The caravan consists of a number of variously suspicious folks, including the sickly Lord Ermenwyr and his extremely lovely nurse; the highly competent cook Mrs. Smith; a courier named Parradan Smith; another family named Smith (yes, it's kind of a joke, though it later becomes somewhat significant); and a Yendri herbalist, as well as a teenaged girl named Burnbright whose job is "runner" -- to run ahead of the caravan.

This first story simply tells of the caravan's journey to Salesh. To be sure, the journey is not without incident -- the caravan is attacked on a couple of occasions, including once at an inn where Smith himself is nearly killed; most of the passengers prove not to be what they seem; Smith finds himself entrusted with an unexpected additional delivery. By the end we have a better idea of the social and political issues of this world, and we more or less know who all the players really are.

The second segment is a murder mystery of sorts. Smith and his fellow caravan workers, at the end of the first section, found it wise to leave the caravan business and open an inn, under the patronage of Lord Ermenwyr. Mrs. Smith is the cook, Burnbright runs messages for the inn, Smith himself is the innkeeper, and others, such as Keyman Smith, work as busboys, waiters, and the like. During Festival time in Salesh, the entire city gives itself over to a few days of sexual license. Unfortunately for Smith, a guest at the inn is murdered, and he is charged by the investigating constable with finding the murderer -- the constable having other plans involving a certain lovely. A further complication is provided by a wizard who has challenged Lord Ermenwyr to a magic duel. And finally, Burnbright falls in love with yet another guest.

Smith's investigations lead him to make some unexpected discoveries about the past life of certain of his associates. He also finds the murderer -- I thought a nicely set up surprise. And Burnbright's affair goes forward, but not without difficulty, and Lord Ermenwyr has his duel -- quite amusingly portrayed.

In the third section, a real estate company is proposing to build a development at a site sacred to the Yendri. This cause considerable interspecies tensions, and indeed it seems that a race war may be unavoidable. Amidst all this Lord Ermenwyr receives a Sending from his sister, who needs his help. Which turns out to involve a boat -- and Smith is the only person Lord Ermenwyr knows who can sail.

The resolution this time involves secrets about Smith's own past, which I thought were revealed fairly cleverly. It also involves dealing with the relationships between all the races, and considerable exploration of the history and myth underlying this fantasy world.

All in all, this is quite an enjoyable novel. It is fairly witty throughout, and cleverly imagined, if most of the setting consists of ringing changes on familiar fantasy environments. The moral is humanistic and affecting. The structure, as hinted, is a bit episodic -- it really is more three separate but linked stories than one unified novel. It's an entertainment, with just a hint of a serious core to it. Amiable, a bit rambling, not a major work but good fun.

Review: Late Stories, Punch and Powell, by Inez Holden

Review: Late Stories, Punch and Powell, by Inez Holden

by Rich Horton

Here's a curious book by a writer I knew nothing about until a couple of weeks ago. Inez Holden was born in 1903 to Wilfred Holden and Beatrice Paget, both from families that could be considered "landed gentry". That marriage was apparently not a very good one (Inez claimed her first memory was of her father shooting at her mother), and Inez' relationship with her mother was also not very good. (For one thing, her mother did not bother to record her birth in a timely fashion, so that the 1903 birth date is not certain -- she may have been born in 1904.) Apparently her mother spent extravagantly on herself, and nothing on Inez. Inez' first novel, Sweet Charlatan, was published in 1929, and her second, Born Old, Died Young, in 1932. She published a number of short stories and another novel in the 1930s. One of her books is a collection of some of those short stories, rewritten in "Basic English", an 800 word vocabulary that was briefly fashionable as a means of spreading English around the world as a sort of common language. 

Holden is best known nowadays for her writing about the home front of World War II. She spent some time working in, or reporting on, wartime factories. A short novel, Night Shift, and a piece of reportage, It Was Different at the Time has been recently reprinted by Handheld Press (a wonderful enterprise!) as Blitz Writing. Handheld have also reprinted There's No Story There, a sort of novel based on three shorter pieces, which appear to be lightly fictionalized accounts of life and work in a wartime factory. Beside these books, and her '30s novels, she published two in the '50s: The Owner, and The Adults. Besides those novels she published a number of short stories in Punch, during the period that Anthony Powell was working there -- these are perhaps more sketches than stories, and they make up the bulk of this book.

Anthony Powell and Inez Holden met in the '20s, when both were, to some degree or another, part of the "Bright Young Things" set. Holden's first two novels went to Duckworth, where Powell worked, and he recommended against publishing them, but he was overruled by Thomas Balston -- and it is suggested that Holden's "personal charms" paid a role. (She was rather a beauty.) But Powell and she remained friends to some degree, and they lunched with Evelyn Waugh at one point. Holden was a friends with Waugh, and H. G. Wells, and Sidney Smith, and George Orwell (in his case, briefly his lover.) Powell used her as the model for Roberta Payne, a significant character in his last pre-War novel, What's Become of Waring (a novel I like a good deal.) While Powell never seems to have much liked her novels, he tended to praise her style, and I think that contributed to his buying her late stories for Punch.

The book at hand is published by the Anthony Powell Society, and edited by Jeff Manley and Robin Bynoe. As such it leans into Holden's connection to Powell. It includes the Punch stories, 17 in all, that appeared between 1953 and 1958. They are short -- between a few hundred and a couple of thousand words. They are dialogue heavy, arch, somewhat absurd, and quite funny. They don't resolve to much in the way of plot, and, really, that's not the point. The characters include Princesses, kleptomaniacs, quacks, failures, Americans ... all kinds of weirdos! They are never less than readable, and mostly immensely amusing, if in the end rather slight. I liked "Love, Breath, and Circumstances", about an American couple thoroughly misinterpreting a book of instructive love letters; and "The Young Table", in which an American schoolgirl in England has to sit at the table for younger girls, a bit of a problem given her interest in older men; and "Myself as Leader", in which the narrator decides to lead a group of hooligans in their criminal enterprises, while staying quite out of things herself; and "The Age of Innocence", about a rackety bunch of old people mistreating each other. But, really, all the stories are worth reading, partly because they never overstay their welcome -- and Holden's narrative voice is a delight.

In addition to the stories, each of the editors, Jeff Manley and Robin Bynoe, contributes an essay, about Holden's life and work, contextualized by her relationship to Powell. There are also reprints of memorial pieces by Powell, and by Holden's cousin Celia Goodman, on the occasion of Holden's death. A few letters between Powell and Goodman, concerning an abortive attempt at collecting some of Holden's short fiction (presumably including these stories from Punch) are reproduced.

This is really quite a worthwhile project, bringing to attention an intriguing selection of work by a minor but unjustly forgotten 20th Century writer. These are just the sort of stories that are wholly of their time, and wholly of their author's voice, and as such perhaps easy to overlook, but in their small way significant. I for one will be looking for her novels -- particularly the science fictional Born Old, Died Young, and the quite odd-looking The Owners.

Review: O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather

Review: O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather

by Rich Horton

Last week right after I finished My Ántonia I sort of by accident read O Pioneers! -- in a single sitting, literally. (Sitting in the emergency room waiting for my wife to get to see a doctor. (In the end, she didn't -- we left. And she's OK. It should have been an urgent care visit anyway.)) So, what the heck, I'll review it too!

O Pioneers! was Willa Cather's second novel, but the first in which she leaned into writing about her childhood landscapes -- and landscapes are key to Cather, though of course so are people. This got her branded, for a while, as "just" a regional writer, but she was so much more than that. And, you know, as a midwesterner myself I have some sensitivity to the whole "the coasts don't think the Midwest matters thing -- "flyover country" or in Cather's time, "take the train through country". Maybe we're oversensitive about that? But, I think not, really. And the way Cather's reputation -- not so much during her lifetime, but pretty much as soon as she died -- became sort of "well, she wrote nicely about Nebraska which nobody ever did, so nice but not important" is kind of an aspect of that. But, happily, in recent decades she's been if not exactly rediscovered at least reevaluated, and has again taken her place as one of the greatest American writers.

Anyway, back to O Pioneers! It's a short novel (about 50,000 words.) It's the first of what is called her "Prairie Trilogy" -- along with The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia. In a way I feel like O Pioneers! and My Ántonia along with A Lost Lady are a better "trilogy", all set in Nebraska towns that very much resemble the Red Cloud of Cather's childhood. (Song of the Lark is set in Colorado (and in non-prairie places like Chicago and Germany!)

O Pioneers! is primarily the story of Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant to Nebraska. We meet her as a teenager. She and her little brother Emil are in town, shopping, and the boy's cat has run up a street lamp. Alexandra fetches her friend Carl Linstrum, who shinnies up the pole and fetches the cat. And then they head home, where Alexandra's father is dying. And we realize that Alexandra, only about 14, must be the head of her family.

The story is told in third person, but Carl Linstrum becomes in a way the person through whom we see Alexandra -- and, also, the other major woman character, Marie Tovesky. So he sort of resembles Jim Burden from My Ántonia, though certainly Jim and Carl are different people, as are Alexandra and Ántonia. And over the years, as Carl goes to university, heads to St. Louis to become an engraver, then to the Klondike gold rush, then back to Nebraska, he encounters Alexandra again and again, sees how she has made a great success of the Bergson farm, though, as she says once, she's often lonely. Alexandra's brothers have a harder time of it, though they benefit from her success -- though Emil, the best of them, perhaps, has special problems. And there is always Marie Tovesky, who fascinates Emil, but who unhappily marries another man ...

There is tragedy aplenty in this novel, and one particularly lurid event. But, too, there is as ever the land, and the people either being conquered by it or conquering. And Alexandra, strong, simple, stolid, unimaginative but intelligent and ambitious, is certainly in that sense a conquerer. Marie is the contrast to her -- very imaginative, loving, not at all simple. The novel ends in a marriage, but it is in no sense a romance. It's effective, and sometimes beautiful -- but it's not the novel My Ántonia is -- in some ways it seems sort of a rehearsal for the later novel. 

I ought to add that the edition I read, a Bantam Classics edition from 1989 (though my copy is a 2008 reprint) has an excellent introduction by Vivian Gornick, which addresses Cather's life and ambitions and achievements, and touches on her prairie novels, especially this one and its immediate successor, The Song of the Lark. Gornick ends by comparing her to a couple of near contemporaries: Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf. She concludes by saying "Today Jean Rhys seems dated, Virginia Woolf important, and Willa Cather wise."

My other reviews of Willa Cather:

My Ántonia 

Death Comes for the Archbishop

A Lost Lady

Review: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

Review: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

by Rich Horton

The other day I reviewed Willa Cather's My Ántonia and mentioned that she and Edith Wharton might be my favorite (classic) American writers. My Ántonia is generally regarded as Cather's best novel -- and so here's a look at what is generally regarded as Wharton's best novel. 

I have discussed Wharton numerous times before:

The House of Mirth

A Backward Glance

Old New York

Major Short Stories: "Roman Fever", "Xingu", "The Eyes", "Autre Temps ..." and "The Long Run", "The Lady's Maid's Bell"

Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in 1862 (11 years before Cather) to a wealthy New York family. She was raised much in the manner of wealthy young women of her time, plenty of travel, a private education (tutors and governesses), and the expectation of an appropriate marriage. She rebelled to an extent, writing from an early age (she tried a novel at 11, completed a novella when 15, and published a translation of a poem anonymously at 15). She married an older man, Edward ("Teddy") Wharton, when she was 23. The marriage foundered, largely, it appears, because of Teddy's mental illness. They divorced in 1913, but Edith had begun an affair with Morton Fullerton several years earlier. She lived primarily in France from about 1908, and she died in 1937.

Wharton published a few short stories and poems in the '80s and '90s. Aside from a privately printed collection of poems, her first book was non-fiction: The Decoration of Houses, in 1897, which is indeed about interior decoration. Her first book length fiction was a novella, The Touchstone, in 1900. Another novella and a full-length novel appeared before The House of Mirth in 2005, which was her first major success. Her other major novels are The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920). She also wrote a great deal of short fiction, including a lot of ghost stories, and a lot of novellas. Her best work at that length is probably those in the collection Old New York; plus the high school assigned reading warhorse, Ethan Frome. At shorter lengths my favorites are "Autre Temps" and "Roman Fever", but there are a lot more -- she was a magnificent writer of short stories. Many of her stories are ghost stories.

The Age of Innocence is set primarily in New York in the 1870s -- in fact, I think it can be precisely dated to 1875. This was, I understand, a purposeful change of pace for Wharton, as most of her fiction was set in contemporary (to her) times, though that is somewhat lost on present-day readers, for whom New York in around the turn of the 20th Century (as with The House of Mirth) is indistinguishable from New York in 1875. But the difference mattered a great deal to Wharton, and it is crucial to this novel.

The hero is Newland Archer, a man of about 30, a somewhat dilettantish lawyer, of a very good and very wealthy family. As the novel opens, he has just become engaged to May Welland, a very eligible young woman (of about 22), from a similarly prominent family. He is very happy. He has not long before finished an affair with a married woman, and is sure that he is now mature and experienced enough to settle down, and he loves May. At the opera that evening, as he is wondering when their engagement will be publicly announced, he notices a woman in the Welland box. This is the Countess Ellen Olenska, a cousin of May's, who has just returned from Europe, having left her abusive husband (a Polish count.) Ellen is about Newland's age, and he had known her well when they were younger. She had a slightly unfairly rackety reputation even then, due to her mother's scandalous life; and as a result she and her mother had moved to Europe, where she had married. It is only the social standing of May's grandmother, the redoubtable Mrs. Manson Mingott (who appears in other Wharton stories) that allows Ellen to appear in public. The intricate social politics of the situation lead Newland and May to allow their engagement to become public earlier than planned, and soon Newland is somewhat intimately involved in other actions aimed to repairing the Countess' social standing.

The next part of the novel concerns an intricate web of parties, other social events, and maneuvering. Newland presses May to convince her parents to move up the wedding -- at first the engagement was to last 18 months or so. The Countess is introduced in various places, but also takes some steps of her own, which include being seen with a notorious and not much trusted married banker (who is, gasp, an Englishman among other crimes.) She is also pursuing a divorce, which her family and the rest of New York society consider a step too far -- living separated from her husband is fine, and conducting discreet affairs is OK, but divorce? No. And Newland is deputized by his law firm to advise her that a divorce would be unwise. This is a problem for him, partly because he has fallen for her, and, it seems, she for him; but he does his duty, and she acquiesces.

Newland Archer is presented as a slightly unconventional young man in his milieu. He is interested in art and literature (Middlemarch is namechecked as a book he has ordered.) He is -- he would maintain -- less bound by his society's conventions. And as events proceed, he contemplates throwing over May and running off with Ellen -- but she is unwilling to do so many people so much hurt. And so the marriage proceeds, and the honeymoon follows ... and a year later there is another crisis, and another decision.

I think most people know how that ends -- how it must -- and then follows the famous and moving last chapter, set decades later, after May had died, and Newland, along with his son and daughter-in-law, visit Paris, where Madame Olenska retires. Wharton manages this beautifully, and it is an achingly sad but inevitable bit of closure ...

I've brushed over a lot of incident, and a lot of nuance above. (And quite a few comic touches.) This truly is a lovely novel. And it continues to raise questions in me. Newland's character is one thing -- he is by no means as unconventional a man as he'd like to think. And May is by no means the innocent and ignorant woman he thinks. Early on we see him thinking about how he will educated her -- almost as a sort of surrogate father, he wishes to introduce her to his passions. But in many ways she remains a step ahead of him -- she is never as innocent or ignorant as he thought, but she is wholly and dutifully a woman of her class, and she knows she does not want to do what Newland wants -- she doesn't want to read the poetry he likes, she doesn't want to travel, she wants him to be the husband she expected. And she gets all that. And, of course, she knew all about his near affair with Madame Olenska.

This was famously made into a well-regarded movie in 1993, directed by Martin Scorcese, and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland, Michelle Pfeiffer as the Countess, and Winona Ryder as May. I saw the movie back then and quite enjoyed it. I need to see it again, and see what I think now.