Edith Wharton's The Muse's Tragedy and Other Stories

Although well-known for her novels, Edith Wharton wrote a lot of short stories during her life. The twenty stories in this collection are from late 1800s to early 1900s. Spanning from early in her career to later in life when she was well-known, widely-read novelist. It is a collection culled from a few other collections I believe.

Where her popular novels are mostly based in old New York society, for these stories, the setting and society is quite varied. Part of the set have one of the protagonists as an aspiring or published writer. A few are ghost or supernatural stories. Some more are about tired marriages. And the rest are in the same vein of New York society and as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. (I have read one, yet to read the other).

The point of short stories is experimentation I guess. There are all these people, some of them not really courageous enough to be written into full-length novels. And stories can be an interesting way of dealing with them summarily. I guess for novels, the setting - the time and society play an important part. For stories, where the problem at hand is quite momentary in time, the range explored can be varied. And that is where I find this collection very rich, and took my time working through it - the number of different characters and their so different lives and their problems. I find the range much wider in these 20 stories than some of the other short story collections I've read.

In this book, I best enjoyed the stories where one of the parties is an aspiring or published writer and trying to write. They seem drawn close from the author's own experiences and ring truer and more authentic. I quite enjoyed the title story - The Muse's Tragedy. (A reminder to read James' The Aspern Papers). And another story that quite touched me was "Autres Temps ..." dealing with the protagonists worries and anxiety which she realizes are not ill-founded although everyone around her tries to convince her otherwise. I am sure with the way society and its veneer works, Wharton's un-layering of that veneer with different characters leads to as many interesting episodes.

I couldn't see the resolution in ghost or supernatural stories. (but then I have read little in that genre, and don't have much to compare them with). I find them strange. I enjoy and love science fiction, but this is different - the supernatural bits I find intriguing. Not a fan. They made me wonder about how one comes up with such ideas. Not really a ghost story, but in similar vein was  'The Journey' which I found quite troubling. This one, and some of the other ghost stories read more like nightmares.

As to the book and its pace, I was slow given each story was quite unique in setting and characters, and required a bit of imagination warming up. Add to that, I found some of the writing a bit tedious.  (I say this, because I find myself holding  Buchan's The Thirty Nine Steps in my hands at the moment, for which I don't have to do much to read. I simply glide.) With Wharton's book, it was a bit of work in some of the stories in the early pages. (As she mentions in Xingu, one has to wade through it) But then they pick up pace, and you wish to see them through.

But her way of thinking and observing, I loved it and noted down parts (mostly, where she deals with perception, and ways of looking and considering).  How people 'feel' their way in conversation, and how it is difficult in one-sided written correspondence. And I think it is from things like this that is where I draw value from books I read. Language itself can be a delight. But the thought, and observation, and what the novelist chooses to tell you irrespective of the smoothness or tediousness of prose is what stays on.

Overall, I enjoyed the collection, and hope to make time to read Ethan Frome, if not The Age of Innocence soon.