Don't forget, Saturday is Edith Wharton's birthday! Here at the Mount, we are celebrating with a special reading from a new screenplay adaptation of "Summer" which will be followed by a reception. To find out more visit :http://www.edithwharton.org/events/1.php?record=171
Although it appears that Mrs. Wharton was not always in a celebratory mood on her birthday ("that melancholy 24th—the saddest day of all the sad new year"), there was at least one which she remembered fondly. In "A Backward Glance" she wrote "And there was one supreme day when, my mother having despairingly asked our old literary advisor, Mr. North at Scribner’s, ‘what she could give the child for her birthday,’ I woke to find beside my bed Buxton Forman’s great editions of Keats and Shelley! Then the gates of the realms of gold swung wide, and from that day to this I don’t believe I was ever again, in my inmost self, wholly lonely or unhappy.”
(The 3rd ed. of Buxton Forman's Keats can be found online at Google Books.)
