Strictly speaking, this volume gives us two studies: the impact of film on Edith Wharton and an examination of film adaptations of her novels. It joins similar studies of Henry James, H. G. Wells and others, which collectively analyse the importance of the cinema for modernist writers.

Wharton appears to be an unpromising case because she early developed a suspicion of movies as a threat to the imagination. Nevertheless they could not be ignored and Parley Ann Boswell gives us a series of incisive studies of those few narratives where Wharton makes explicit reference to the cinema. Thus the story “Charm Inc.” contains a parody of Garbo and investigates the Hollywood charm industry, and The Children (1928) presents the modern world as a continuing movie. Here and in other stories Wharton demonstrates her shrewd recognition of the conversion of the world into spectacle and the positioning of young female characters as the focus of the male gaze.

Boswell shows how the cinema presented Wharton with a means of exploring her own relation to popular culture and argues that in her post-World War I fiction she began to make use of quasi-cinematic sequences of visually discrete scenes. This shrewd insight is tantalizingly brief, but suggests that in common with many writers Wharton deplored the commercialism of Hollywood but was fascinated by the techniques of the cinema. Or perhaps “deplored” is too strong because from an early stage in her career Wharton was by no means averse to selling the film rights to her fiction. Indeed, one of the most frustrating areas of this study is that many of the early adaptations of Wharton have been lost and there seems to be no extant correspondence relating to them.

The second half of this volume concerns itself with these adaptations from the 1920s up to the present. As if to confirm Wharton's fears, in some cases her narratives were simplified, but this was by no means a consistent process. Boswell shows how sophisticated montage effects were used in the early Age of Innocence and how the adaptation of The Old Maid followed her text closely. Noting these cases, Boswell demonstrates the complexities of Wharton's visual sensibility.