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Death to Lady Bountiful: Women and Reform in Edith Wharton's "The Fruit of the Tree."(early 20th-century novel)(Critical Essay)

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From: Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Date: 20010101
Author:MARCHAND, MARY V.

The consensus among several generations of critics is that Wharton's 1907 novel The Fruit of the Tree lacks a stable core of concerns. [1] "There was stuff here for a dozen novels," Millicent Bell concludes (253-54). Henry James's judgment was no less decisive for his characteristic indirection. After praising the novel to Wharton as a thing "of a great deal of (though not perhaps of a completely superior) art," he adds, "Where my qualifications would come in would be as to the terrible question of the composition & conduct of the thing" (Powers 78). He would later complain to ...

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