"I can re-christen the bishop at any time" - Autograph Letter about Naming a Character

A very interesting autograph letter from the beloved American novelist and short story writer to the American astronomer Edward Singleton Holden. October 22, [no year.] Responding to a letter in which Holden apparently tried to help her with a question about the titles of Catholic bishops, Wharton writes: 

"It is very kind of you to have remembered an enquiry made so long ago, & your information does not come too late - though, alas! it comes in the wrong language. The difficulty was to know how R. C. bishops were designated in English in the 18th century - or in the 19th, for that matter. If you come across a solution of this question please think of me again. My book is still in the making & I can re-christen the bishop at any time." On her Lenox, Mass. letterhead. 2 pp. of a bifolium. Central crease from mailing, else in fine condition. 

The letter likely concerns Wharton's story "Expiation," which was originally published in Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan, in December of 1903, when Wharton had acquired a reputation as a writer but had not reached the large readership she was to gain two years later, with The House of Mirth. The story is about a young woman novelist who is awaiting with a mixture of anticipation and fear the press's reaction to the publication of her first novel, Fast and Loose (an ironic reference to the unpublished novella by the same name which Wharton wrote in 1876-1877, when she was fifteen). The novice, Paula Fetherel, a comfortably married and respectable New York society lady, has an uncle, the self-important Bishop of Ossining, whose literary works include "The Wail of Jonah" (twenty cantos in blank verse) and "Through a Glass Brightly," an edifying tale of a poor consumptive girl struggling to support her two idiot sisters. The bishop's works, we gather, do not sell well and Fetherel fears that her bishop uncle will be irrevocably offended by the light morals of her book.   Eventually the bishop is persuaded to denounce his niece's novel from the pulpit, whereupon it immediately becomes a best seller. 

Although she did not publish her first novel until she was forty, Edith Wharton was an extremely prolific writer, publishing fifteen novels, seven novellas, and eighty-five short stories, as well as poetry, books on design, travel, literary and cultural criticism, and a memoir. She and her husband, Edward Wharton, were keen European travelers, often spending four months of the year away from the United States. A well-connected member of the upper class, Wharton was also a friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her era, including Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Teddy Roosevelt.

Edward Singleton Holden was an  American astronomer and the fifth president of the University of California. A prolific writer, he wrote mostly on scientific subjects, but also published several books and articles on history and current events.  (14556)

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Autograph Letter

Literature

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