Edith Wharton: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1862 to 1937
Quick answer: Edith Wharton craft file: the social trap, the ghost recognised too late, "Roman Fever", "The Other Two", "Afterward", and what her stories teach about endings.
Quick facts
- Born: 1862, New York City, as Edith Newbold Jones
- Died: 1937, Saint-Brice-sous-Foret, France, aged 75
- Wrote in: English
- Known for: "Roman Fever", "The Other Two", "Afterward"
- Signature move: The last line spoken by the person who has been losing all along
- Start with: "The Other Two" (1904), then "Roman Fever" (1934)
Wharton published eighty-odd stories across nearly forty years and treated the form as seriously as the novels that made her famous. Her subject is the closed room of upper-class manners, where nobody says what they mean and a raised eyebrow can end a marriage, and she wrote it with the cold clarity of someone who had been raised inside it and escaped to France.
What she actually does on the page
She builds a story out of a single social arrangement and then tightens it. "The Other Two" (1904) gives Waythorn a new wife, Alice, who has two living ex-husbands, and arranges for both men to enter his life through business and a sick child. Each scene adds one more encounter he cannot refuse, until the final page has all three husbands in one drawing room taking tea from Alice's hands. Wharton never editorialises about divorce; she shows a man learning that his wife's ease with all three of them is her whole character.
She makes the ghost a matter of timing. In "Afterward" (1910) the Boynes are told their new English house has a ghost, but one you only know was a ghost afterward. A stranger calls; Ned Boyne walks out with him and never returns; only weeks later does Mary work out who the visitor was and what her husband's American business had done to him. The horror is not the apparition; it is the wife's slow understanding.
She lets a whole rivalry surface in one afternoon. "Roman Fever" (1934) sits two widowed friends on a terrace above the Forum while their daughters are out, and lets a decades-old jealousy come up through small talk and knitting. Mrs. Slade confesses she once forged a letter to send the other woman to a cold ruin at night; Mrs. Ansley answers with three words about her daughter. Everything the reader has been told about the two women's lives is reordered by them.
The signature move
The last line spoken by the loser is the Wharton ending, and "Roman Fever" is its purest form because the two women have been keeping score for twenty-five years without admitting there was a game. Mrs. Slade has the wit, the confidence and the better marriage; she has spent the afternoon condescending to her old friend. Wharton lets her play her trump, the forged letter, in full. Then she gives Mrs. Ansley one plain sentence and stops. There is no reaction paragraph, no description of Mrs. Slade's face. The reader is left to recount the whole afternoon and discover who was condescending to whom. A story writer can learn from this that the strongest reversal is delivered by the quietest character, and that nothing should follow it.
Stories to read first
Seven stories, from 1899 to 1934.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
Her world is narrow by design, and the narrowness can look like snobbery when a lesser writer borrows it; the servants and the poor in her stories are mostly furniture, and her attitudes toward class and, in a few stories, toward race, belong to old New York. The prose can be over-upholstered. Take the trap and the timing; simplify the sentences.
Life at a glance
- 1862: Born into old New York money
- 1899: The Greater Inclination, her first collection of stories
- 1904: "The Other Two"
- 1910: "Afterward" and "The Eyes", in Tales of Men and Ghosts
- 1911: Ethan Frome; she settles permanently in France
- 1921: Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, the first awarded to a woman
- 1934: "Roman Fever"
- 1937: Dies in France; the collection Ghosts appears the same year
What writers can take from this
- Build the plot as a series of obligations the protagonist cannot refuse.
- Let the ghost's meaning arrive after the ghost has gone.
- Give the winning line to the character who has seemed to be losing.
- End on the reversal itself, with no aftermath.
- Write manners as plot: what people do with a teacup is an event.
Try it yourself
Two people who have known each other for thirty years spend an afternoon together somewhere with a view. One of them has always been the more successful and says so, kindly. Write the conversation in under 1,000 words. In the last two lines the other reveals, in the plainest possible words, something that reorders the whole history. Stop there.
Questions
What is Edith Wharton's best short story?
"Roman Fever" (1934) is the most anthologised and the one most often ranked first. "The Other Two" (1904) and "Afterward" (1910) are the usual companions.
How did Edith Wharton influence the short story?
She refined the story of social manners into a mechanism of traps and reversals, and her ghost stories set a standard for the supernatural tale told through psychology rather than spectacle.
Is Edith Wharton hard to read?
The sentences are formal but clear, and the stories are conventionally plotted. Some knowledge of Gilded Age social rules helps; the stories supply most of it as they go.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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