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"

Franzen, though, has another point to make. “Edith Newbold Jones did have one potentially redeeming disadvantage,” he writes. “She wasn’t pretty.” And later, “Edith Wharton might well be more congenial to us now, if alongside her other advantages, she’d looked like Grace Kelly or Jacqueline Kennedy.”

Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work. Franzen perpetuates the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.

"  - From novelist Victoria Patterson’s (This Vacant Paradise) piece in the LA Review of Books that focuses on Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay on Edith Wharton. (via libraryjournal)

(via libraryjournal)



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    (*shameface*). I’ll probably start with House...Mirth, maybe during
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