The Glimpses of the Moon
Edith Wharton, 1922
200-300 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young, attractive, but impoverished New Yorkers. They are in love and decide to marry, but realize their chances of happiness are slim without the wealth and society that their more privileged friends take for granted.
The two agree to separate when either encounters a more eligible proposition. However, as they honeymoon in friends' lavish houses, from a villa on Lake Como to a Venetian palace, jealous passions and troubled consciences cause the idyll to crumble.
Edith Wharton has perceptively described the choices faced by Nick and Susy; the same dilemma still facing those seduced by the pleasures of society. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 24, 1862
• Where—New York, NY
• Death—August 11, 1937
• Where—Paris, France
• Education: Educated privately in New York and Europe
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, 1921,
French Legion of Honor, 1916
One of America's most important novelists, Edith Wharton was a refined, relentless chronicler of the Gilded Age and its social mores. Along with close friend Henry James, she helped define literature at the turn of the 20th century, even as she wrote classic nonfiction on travel, decorating and her own life.
More
Edith Newbold Jones was born January 24, 1862, into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." The youngest of three children, Edith spent her early years touring Europe with her parents and, upon the family's return to the United States, enjoyed a privileged childhood in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. Edith's creativity and talent soon became obvious: By the age of eighteen she had written a novella (as well as witty reviews of it) and published poetry in the Atlantic Monthly.
After a failed engagement, Edith married a wealthy sportsman, Edward Wharton. Despite similar backgrounds and a shared taste for travel, the marriage was not a success. Many of Wharton's novels chronicle unhappy marriages, in which the demands of love and vocation often conflict with the expectations of society.
Wharton's first major novel, The House of Mirth, published in 1905, enjoyed considerable literary success. Ethan Frome appeared six years later, solidifying Wharton's reputation as an important novelist. Often in the company of her close friend, Henry James, Wharton mingled with some of the most famous writers and artists of the day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Jack London
In 1913 Edith divorced Edward. She lived mostly in France for the remainder of her life. When World War I broke out, she organized hostels for refugees, worked as a fund-raiser, and wrote for American publications from battlefield frontlines. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her courage and distinguished work.
The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York in the 1870s, earned Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 — the first time the award had been bestowed upon a woman.
Wharton traveled throughout Europe to encourage young authors. She also continued to write, lying in her bed every morning, as she had always done, dropping each newly penned page on the floor to be collected and arranged when she was finished. Wharton suffered a stroke and died on August 11, 1937. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.
Extras
• Surprisingly, in addition to her career as a fiction writer, Wharton was also a well-known interior designer. Her book, The Decoration of Houses was widely read and is today considered the first modern manual of interior design.
• Upon the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905, Wharton became an instant celebrity, and the the book was an instant bestseller, with 80,000 copies ordered from Scribner's six weeks after its release.
• Wharton had a great fondness for dogs, and owned several throughout her life. (From Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few online reviews by mainstream press. See customer reviews at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)
(Audio version.) Anna Fields reads this edition with precision. The novel's premise is simple: a man and a woman who are financially strapped decide to marry to remain in the high society circles to which they have become accustomed. They will use their wedding gifts to better position one another's opportunity to remarry for money. The dilemma, of course, comes when they discover separately that their love for each other is far greater than the false, pretentious, and self-indulgent lives they are seeking. Wharton strikes a balance between the superficial and the genuine, and between dependency and freedom that allows the reader to observe the foibles and follies of life and learn from them.
Library Journal
Wharton's novel opens with a sentence that seems to have been written for the opening voice-over of a movie: "It rose for them—their honeymoon—over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own." But Nick and Susy Lansing, each suffering from a genteel lack of money, have married out of convenience rather than romantic rapture. Intending to live off the generosity of wealthy acquaintances, they have also agreed that each shall be free to pursue a more socially desirable mate. What they didn't anticipate is that they would fall genuinely in love with each other. As Wharton tells their story, the sharp irony of both her prose and her characters bleeds into pools of true feeling.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Glimpses of the Moon:
1. Do you find Susy and Nick sympathetic characters? Do your attitudes toward them change during the course of the novel?
2. Talk about the reason the two marry and the bargain they strike with one another. Do you consider their plan morally bankrupt...or not? If Susy and Nick exist in a social strata that privileges material wealth above all else, are they dishonest ...cynical... opportunistic...simply besting their social "betters" at their own game...or what?
3. Susy says to Nick that "we're both rather unusually popular." What is it about the two that makes them so appealing to others?
4. Nick and Susy seem to occupy two ends of a spectrum in terms of character values. How would you define the difference between them?
5. Ellie Vanderlyn asks Susy to help her deceive Nelson Vanderlyn, her husband. Was Ellie right to agree to help, given that she and Nick are dependent on Ellie's hospitality? What are her options? What would you have done?
6. In what way does Susy's participation in Ellie's scheme undermine her relationship with Nick?
7. How does Wharton portray those of the moneyed class, their values and lifestyle? Does she draw them affectionately...satirically...scornfully? How do you feel about the fact that Wharton, herself, is part of that social milieu?
8. Both Susy and Nick undertake a personal journey. Trace the journey they both make—where they start from and where they end up? How does each change...what does each come to learn about him/herself and about the world in which they live?
9. What is the significance of the book's title? What does the moon represent symbolically?
10. What "lesson" is learned by the book's end? Are you satisfied with how The Glimpses of the Moon ended? Is the conclusion "earned" — in other words, does it flow naturally from what precedes it, or does it feel forced and tacked on?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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