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Edith Wharton was a travel and architectural writer as well as a novelist. Her belief in the classical principles of order and harmony is revealed in her non-fiction works and this led her to a conviction of the need for a coherent theory of fiction. However, her attempt to formulate such a theory was undermined by her romantic idea of inspiration and imagination, and this tension between classical and romantic principles is clearly revealed by comparisons between her works of non-fiction and fiction.