Jim Fonseca's Reviews > A Granted Prayer

I just came across this previously unpublished short story by Edith Wharton. It’s available on the web at the link below. I created a post for it on GR. Here’s the introduction to it written by Emily Temple of the Literary Hub (the next two paragraphs):

This morning, The Atlantic has graced us a brand new (that is, quite old but never before published) short story by Edith Wharton, entitled “A Granted Prayer.” The story was discovered by scholar Sarah Whitehead, who found the typescript in the Wharton archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale during the course of her postdoctoral research on Wharton’s short fiction. The editors of The Atlantic note:

This satire of genteel stuffiness—which takes comic aim at contemporaneous debates about the role of environment, biology, and free will in human development—is set in Hillbridge, a fictional university town that features in at least four other Wharton stories and her novella The Touchstone, all written between 1898 and 1911. Whitehead dates “A Granted Prayer” to that same period, in the first half of a fiction-writing career that began in 1891 and continued until Wharton’s death in 1937. The original spelling and punctuation have been preserved.

It's a good story, just a few pages, about a professor living in a house surrounded by women: his oldest daughter and two of her aunts. His three grown sons have all moved away. One’s in the Navy, one’s a stockbroker and one is a bank clerk. He and all the women are in unanimous agreement: “I shall never understand why, with all their opportunities, all three of the poor dear boys should be such failures. Of course one doesn’t love them any the less—”

The professor wants an intellectual companion. He and all the women agree it has to be a male. So there’s tongue-in-cheek aspect to the story when we read “…but women’s minds are so hopelessly inferior that we shall never be the companions he needs.”

And then, a surprise.



Photo of the author from lareviewofbooks-org

Here's the link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...