Afterward [short fiction]
by Edith Wharton
On This Page
Description
A newly rich American couple buy an ancient manor house in England, where they hope to live out their days in solitude. One day, when the couple are gazing out at their grounds, they spy a mysterious stranger. When her husband disappears shortly after this eerie encounter, the wife learns the truth about the legend that haunts the ancient estate.Tags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Atmospheric and compelling, this gripping tale begins slowly and builds gradually to its horrifying conclusion. Edith Wharton sure knows her craft, and this melancholy little tale, full of dread and pathos, offers a memorable experience. Well worth the read.
Atmospheric and appropriately eerie, this story will give you the shivers. An American couple are seeking a retirement country house. The husband wants to have a ghost in his home, and this, I believe, falls into the category of “be careful what you wish for because you may get it.” It’s a classic Victorian ghost by the wonderful Edith Wharton.
The rambles and seems disjointed for the most part, but somehow I had enough curiosity to get through it. By the time I got to the end I had an aha! moment, but I'm also still confused like maybe the story was meant to be vaguely conclusive but still largely keep you wondering. I appreciate that it had supernatural elements and wasn't just about paranoid people.
The central theme of the work is interesting - the mounting of tension as a wife discovers and gradually learns more re a lawsuit against her husband arising from money gained from a mining investment. (No small matter as the earnings formed the basis for the couple's early retirement to a remote English villa).
However, I personally did not find the ghost aspects of the story either particularly interesting or unsettling.
However, I personally did not find the ghost aspects of the story either particularly interesting or unsettling.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
100 Hemskaste
81 works; 1 member
Author Information
377+ Works 63,557 Members
Edith Wharton was a woman of extreme contrasts; brought up to be a leisured aristocrat, she was also dedicated to her career as a writer. She wrote novels of manners about the old New York society from which she came, but her attitude was consistently critical. Her irony and her satiric touches, as well as her insight into human character, show more continue to appeal to readers today. As a child, Wharton found refuge from the demands of her mother's social world in her father's library and in making up stories. Her marriage at age 23 to Edward ("Teddy") Wharton seemed to confirm her place in the conventional role of wealthy society woman, but she became increasingly dissatisfied with the "mundanities" of her marriage and turned to writing, which drew her into an intellectual community and strengthened her sense of self. After publishing two collections of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899) and Crucial Instances (1901), she wrote her first novel, The Valley of Decision (1902), a long, historical romance set in eighteenth-century Italy. Her next work, the immensely popular The House of Mirth (1905), was a scathing criticism of her own "frivolous" New York society and its capacity to destroy her heroine, the beautiful Lily Bart. As Wharton became more established as a successful writer, Teddy's mental health declined and their marriage deteriorated. In 1907 she left America altogether and settled in Paris, where she wrote some of her most memorable stories of harsh New England rural life---Ethan Frome (1911) and Summer (1917)---as well as The Reef (1912), which is set in France. All describe characters forced to make moral choices in which the rights of individuals are pitted against their responsibilities to others. She also completed her most biting satire, The Custom of the Country (1913), the story of Undine Spragg's climb, marriage by marriage, from a midwestern town to New York to a French chateau. During World War I, Wharton dedicated herself to the war effort and was honored by the French government for her work with Belgian refugees. After the war, the world Wharton had known was gone. Even her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), a story set in old New York, could not recapture the former time. Although the new age welcomed her---Wharton was both a critical and popular success, honored by Yale University and elected to The National Institute of Arts and Letters---her later novels show her struggling to come to terms with a new era. In The Writing of Fiction (1925), Wharton acknowledged her debt to her friend Henry James, whose writings share with hers the descriptions of fine distinctions within a social class and the individual's burdens of making proper moral decisions. R.W.B. Lewis's biography of Wharton, published in 1975, along with a wealth of new biographical material, inspired an extensive reevaluation of Wharton. Feminist readings and reactions to them have focused renewed attention on her as a woman and as an artist. Although many of her books have recently been reprinted, there is still no complete collected edition of her work. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Afterward [short fiction]
- Original title
- Afterward
- Original publication date
- 1910
- First words
- Oh, there is one, of course, but you'll never know it.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"You won't know till afterward," it said. "You won't know till long, long afterward."
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 112
- Popularity
- 288,863
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.69)
- Languages
- English, Italian
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 13
- ASINs
- 4
