At Books Do Furnish A Room, Terence Jagger has posted a very thoughtful review of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. He starts out by saying:
A Kipling character remarks somewhere that Jane Austen's only issue was Henry James! If The Age of Innocence is representative of her writing, he could... have added Edith Wharton.In the respects that matter - and based on the four books of Wharton's that I've read* - I think Terence is right. There's much of the Jane Austen eye to Edith Wharton: the same acute social observation, the dissection of manners and hypocrisies, the exploration of the stage-by-stage inner development of relations of passion. But there's a key difference, and it's one hinted at in his account of Wharton's powerful novel. Within the conventions and constraints of their world Austen shows her central characters moving, so to say, towards one another and (each time) eventually finding happiness in love. In that regard, Wharton is very much the opposite; the love that is most desired by her protagonists is deferred and deferred again - to be finally thwarted or restrained, or crushed by disaster.
Were it not so silly, I might even go so far as to suggest that the word 'thwart' is contained within 'Edith Wharton'. Oh dear, I see I have suggested it. How silly. (Update: But see, now, the follow-up post here.)
* The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome and Summer.