Books

The introduction to Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country, which I edited for Broadview Press (2008), talks about the influence of Jane Austen characters Emma Woodhouse, Mary Crawford, and Lady Susan Vernon on Wharton’s restless, ambitious heroine Undine Spragg, who, even when she has everything she wants, thinks there might be “other things she might want if she knew about them.”

Combined with Sarah Emsley’s incisive and well-researched introduction and notes, this excellent new edition of the novel includes well-chosen readings ranging from selections from Charles Darwin and Thorstein Veblen to excepts from novels by Harold Frederic and Anita Loos that shed light on Wharton’s audacious protagonist, Undine Spragg. The result is a volume that not only restores the social and economic contexts for the novel but sharpens the reader’s appreciation for Wharton’s satire in this book the most savage—and the most humorous—novel of her long career.
—Donna Campbell, Washington State University

This is an excellent edition of what I consider to be Wharton’s best novel…. If I were teaching this novel, this is the edition I would recommend to my students.
—Robin Peel, University of Plymouth

You can buy the book from your local independent bookseller (find a bookstore here or here), or order through amazon.ca or amazon.com.

Download Broadview’s flyer for the book here.

In Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, a collection of essays I edited for the Jane Austen Society (2006), my own essay discusses the responses of Edith Wharton and other writers to Austen’s happy endings.

You can order the book from the Jane Austen Society.

 

 

 

 

My book Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (Palgrave, 2005) analyzes Austen’s engagement with the seven classical and theological virtues, exploring the dramatic moments in the novels when the virtues come into conflict not just with vices, but with other virtues.

[Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues] suggests that although great writing can exist in an age of doubt, the tradition of the virtues must fade and diminish—and thus that the coherent complexity of the virtues has never since been surpassed or equaled. Nor has it hitherto been fully explicated with Emsley’s admirable blend of clarity, precision, erudition, and plausibility.
—Peter W. Graham, JASNA News

You can read part of my discussion of the virtue of charity here, in an article published in Persuasions On-line. Chapter Six, “Learning the Art of Charity in Emma,” was reprinted in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Jane Austen, New Edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2009): 279-95.

You can buy Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues from your local independent bookseller (find a bookstore here or here), or find it through indiebound.org, amazon.ca, or amazon.com.

My history of St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade (Formac, 1999) was published on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and of Halifax’s first church, now the oldest Protestant church in Canada.

You can buy the book from your local independent bookseller (find a bookstore here or here), or order through amazon.ca or amazon.com.