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Jean Stafford, in her essay "Truth in Fiction" (1966), suggests that her reading of Edith Wharton's novels had a profound influence on her own writing during a critical period in her life, the winter of 1948-49. At that time, Stafford had published two well-received novels, Boston Adventure and The Mountain Lion, and was living alone in New York struggling in vain to write a third novel, to be titled 'In the Snowfall.' To escape the noise in her apartment building, she recalls, she went to the New York Public Library to write. "In the quiet there I would come to terms with my book. But I tended to come to terms with the books Edith Wharton had written rather than with the one I had not" (4562). Shortly afterwards she put aside her own novel, which she never finished.
Stafford does not say which novels of Wharton she read, or what moved her to read them, or what effects, if any, her reading had on her decision to abandon her own work. But one may surmise that she turned to Edith Wharton's fiction because she felt affinities with her predecessor. Indeed, reviewers of Stafford's novels identified her with both James and Wharton. For instance, Richard Hayes found in The Catherine Wheel (1952) "the oppressive concern with elegance and decor which afflicts even the best of Edith Wharton's fiction" but concluded that "like Mrs. Wharton, Miss Stafford has written a novel to compel the imagination and nourish the mind" (404-405). Another reviewer of The Catherine Wheel, John McAleer, declared Jean Stafford "properly linked" with Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Edith Wharton (113).
Henry James was always Stafford's idol, but of the four writers, Edith Wharton is the one with whom Stafford has the most in common. The resemblances between them are especially notable in their short fiction. Characters rendered powerless by the roles they feel they must play, women seeking escape from marriages that threaten to destroy them, the vacuity and cruelty of fashionable society made significant only by the value of what it destroys - these themes so prominent in Wharton's fiction are developed as powerfully by Jean Stafford as by any other of Wharton's successors. Wharton's narrative techniques were congenial to Stafford...