Just over a century ago, in October 1917, after months spent transporting troops across the Atlantic, American forces began major combat engagements in Europe. The war had already been raging for over three years and many Americans had long been reporting on the conflict and aiding relief efforts. One of the most visible American civilians during the war’s early years was the expatriate Edith Wharton.
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Edith Wharton: A Son at the Front (LOA eBook Classic) Only $2.99 |
In the midst of all this, Wharton found the time to make five visits to the front and toured military hospitals to investigate the need for blankets and clothing. And she edited a benefit anthology, convincing (among others) Jean Cocteau, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, William Dean Howells, George Santayana, W. B. Yeats, Sarah Bernhardt, Henry James, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Igor Stravinsky to contribute. (Wharton translated the non-English works herself.) In appreciation of her activities, she was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government and Chevalier of the Order of Leopold by King Albert of Belgium.
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Wharton with five American soldiers in Paris, 1918, including (on the right) Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, Quentin and Archibald. [From As It Was: A Memoir, by Robert M. Pennoyer] |
A Son at the Front finally appeared in 1923. Inspired by a young man Wharton met during her war relief work, the novel opens in Paris on July 30, 1914, as Europe totters on the brink of war. Expatriate American painter John Campton, whose only son George, having been born in Paris, must report for duty in the French army, struggles to keep his son away from the front while grappling with the moral implications of doing so. The novel concerns itself not with battles and military operations but instead describes what Wharton herself witnessed firsthand: civilian life during wartime, the relief efforts, and the care and recovery of wounded soldiers.
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in Edith Wharton: Four Novels of the 1920s |
In recent years a number of writers and critics have argued that A Son at the Front deserves a second look. “The novel—like Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room or Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier—has its own integrity as a novel about the Great War without once depicting a battle scene,” writes literary scholar Julie Olin-Ammentorp. “Wharton’s very avoidance of the front may also have contributed to the neglect of her novel.” And a review two decades ago in Publishers Weekly likewise urges reconsideration, calling it “an extraordinarily poignant novel. . . . Wharton movingly portrays those left behind during war—not the wives and children but the devastated parents, who are forced to go on living at the cost of their own flesh and blood. Heartrending, tragic, powerful, this is not to be missed.”