When Edith Wharton became friends with Henry James, she joined a group of men who became her "inner circle" or, sometimes, "the happy few." This group included both well-known figures, such as James, Percy Lubbock, and Bernard Berenson, and several now forgotten, including John Hugh Smith, Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Robert Norton, and Howard Sturgis. Drawing on unpublished archival material by and about members of the circle, Susan Goodman here presents an intimate view of this American expatriate community, as well as the larger transatlantic culture it mirrored. She explores how the group, which began forming around 1904 and lasted until Wharton's death in 1937, defined itself against the society its founders had left in the United States, while simultaneously criticizing and accommodating the one it found in Europe. Tracing Wharton's individual relationships with these men and their relationships with one another, she examines literary kinships and movements in the biographical and feminist context of gender, exile, and aesthetics. Individual chapters focus on the history of the circle, its connections to and competition with the Bloomsbury Group, the central friendship of Wharton and James, the dynamics of influence within the circle, and the effect of Wharton's vision of the inner circle on her fiction. A concluding chapter examines the phenomenon of literary exile and investigates how other writers - Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among them - positioned themselves in their inherited or chosen places. Filled with new insights into Wharton's works and her relationships with a group of asexual or homoerotically oriented men, this study will be important reading for allreaders of American literature, literary modernism, and gender studies.

Product Description: The novelist Susan Goodman - herself a child of the Second World War - wanted to commemorate and celebrate the experiences of a special generation before they were lost to history. When she appealed for stories, she was overwhelmed by the response...read more

Product Description: The novelist Susan Goodman - herself a child of the Second World War - wanted to commemorate and celebrate the experiences of a special generation before they were lost to history. When she appealed for stories, she was overwhelmed by the response...read more

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Product Description: In Ellen Glasgow: A Biography, Susan Goodman vividly brings the famously secretive writer to life, penetrating the myths, half-truths, and lies that have swirled around Glasgow since the publication of her first novel, The Descendent, in 1896...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This collection focuses on questions of biography, autobiography and aesthetics in Wharton's works, with particular attention to gender, race and class. The volume high-lights previously unpublished manuscripts and letters - notably, an unfinished short story in Italian and Wharton's correspondence with her niece Beatrix Farrand...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: During her lifetime the name of Gertrude Bell evoked rich images of the exotic and mysterious Arab world. But her fame faded and now she is remembered only as a friend and colleague of T.E. Lawrence. She was an intrepid traveller, journeying alone through the deserts of the Middle East or scaling testing peaks in the Swiss Alps...read more

Product Description: Robin and Kate meet in Paris and fall in love. After ten years of successful and happy marriage their five-year-old son dies of meningitis and the relationship is tested to its limits as they are plunged into unendurable grief.

Book by Goodman, Susan

Product Description: A story of three generations of women, the men they are drawn to and why. In particular, it is the story of a young woman, building up her business as a florist and her developing relationships with both a barrister and a journalist.

From conception through adolescence, this informative guide explains how to recognize and deal with the difficulties of each stage of growth, covering all facets of physical, emotional, and social growth