Adventures with Edith: The reverse-engineering and transcription of variants in the galley proofs for Book 2, Chapters 9-14 is done, and let’s just say that some pages were easier to work on than others.

I’m back to Book 1, Chapter 8 (there is no MS for Chapter 7), and here are two treats from it. First of all, you EW people know that Edith Wharton’s grammar and spelling are perfect–in English, anyway, and probably in French, Italian, and German as well. As I told my students working on transcribing the unpublished EW: if you think she’s made a mistake, look again. It’s not her; it’s you. But in all these tens of thousands of words, I have found one misspelling: buoyancy, which she spells “bouyancy.” Raise your hands if you would probably misspell this, too–anyone? anyone?

Second: Gus Trenor. Wharton leaves in all the descriptions of his heavy, sweaty, red-faced diving into his food & general grossness, but she deleted this gem in the final book. Lily’s standing there looking at the wedding-present jewels and thinking “why should Evie Van Osburgh marry Gryce & get all the good stuff?” when Gus lumbers up “as impervious to her annoyance as a pachyderm to the shrinking of a trodden grass-blade.” The book leaves off at “annoyance,” so we never got the image of Gus as an elephant stomping all over that trodden grass-blade Lily. Whether that’s because the image is comical, or too on-the-nose, or at odds with the imagery of Gus as a carnivore only God and Mrs. Wharton now know.