Glimpses of the Moon

by Edith Wharton, Pushkin Press, 328 pages, paperback, $18.00, ISBN- 978-1901285567

By Alidë Kohlhaas

Now and then it becomes absolutely necessary for me to go back in literary history by reading about the milieu of a writer, who appears to have gone out of fashion. One of these is Edith Wharton, the first woman ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Age of Innocence. Her books were much in demand, but after her death at age 75 in 1937, her work was seen as pointless, and so neglected in favor of writers with a more innovative, experimental style such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

In 1922, just two years after winning the Pulitzer, Wharton published the highly acclaimed, international bestseller, Glimpses of the Moon. It was turned into a film in 1923. Strangely enough, today it is one of her least known books. Thanks to Britain's Pushkin Press, we can now read it again. Like all of Wharton's novels—she also wrote short stories, poems, travelogues and books on design, architecture and gardens—Glimpses of the Moon takes a close look at upper crust society of her time. As an insider to this milieu, Wharton took almost an anthropological view of her class in the early parts of the 20th century, and the later parts of the 19th. She dissected her own kind, sometimes wittily, sometimes much more harshly.

Hers is an often satiric view, always entertaining, but also sometimes painful as she paints the superfluous lives of many of her social compatriots. Glimpses of the Moon and Wharton's other books should be must read material by those, who drift about the world with aimlessness, in pursuit of ever-eluding happiness, while they contribute little to the well-being of our planet. Her books are also, without . . . .

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