What's With Jonathan Franzen Bashing Edith Wharton?

Planning to teach Wharton soon, I took another look at Franzen's New Yorker hatchet job on Edith Wharton and it was worse than I remembered. The critics' darling praises her classics The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, but grossly misreads her character and her life.




For a contemporary novelist Franzen sounds remarkably old-school sexist when he harps on Wharton's appearance: "Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now if...she'd looked like...