1. Teddy Wharton to Sally Norton, February 26, 1907, in the Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Library.

2. "Les Derniers Mots," rough handwritten notes taken by Elisina Tyler shortly before Wharton's death, possibly part of a sheaf of papers called "Dernier Journal d'EW," in the Wharton Collection, Beinecke Library.

3. Personal report to Louis Auchincloss, in Wharton, 94.

4. "Les Derniers Mots."

5. Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton, 54. Although Lubbock may have incorporated his own injured feelings into his portrait of Wharton, his perceptions of the contradictions of her character are extremely valuable.

6. "Les Derniers Mots."

7. Typed "Notes" or reminiscences of Edith Wharton, written by Beatrix Farrand, in the Auchincloss section of the Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Library.

8. "Les Derniers Mots."

9. Lubbock, Portrait, 43.

10. According to interviews conducted in the 1950s by George Markow-Totevy and now deposited with the Wharton materials in the

Beinecke Library, Wharton's surviving friends thought it impossible for her to have had a sexual relationship with such a man as Berry and knew that the lover was Morton Fullerton.

11. Lewis, Biography, 288, 344.

12. Letters numbered 17, 41, and 44, in 47 Unpublished Letters from Marcel Proust to Walter Berry (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930). Although this limited edition purports to contain English translations of the letters by Harry and Caresse Crosby, the translating is generally believed to have been the work of Proust's brother Robert. I quote from the translations in this dual-language edition.

13. "Les Derniers Mots."

14. See Lubbock, Portrait, 8: "She was herself a novel of his, no doubt in his earlier manner."

15. Lyall Powers, ed., Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915, 111.

16. For another decade she had the intermittent companionship of Walter Berry and her attentive circle of benedicks. Her most reliable emotional supports for the final stretch were a few woman friends, her niece Beatrix Farrand, her pet dogs, and her female servants.

17. This view challenges the established critical tradition, as represented by both R. W. B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, which holds that Wharton's work moved from criticism of social repression toward the acceptance of tradition as the preserver of civilization.

18. Wharton's preoccupation with incest was recognized by Wolff in Feast of Words and forcefully treated by Adeline R. Tintner in "Mothers, Daughters, and Incest in the Late Novels of Edith Wharton."

19. Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 40.

20. Letter, March 1908.

21. Lewis, "The Question of Edith Wharton's Paternity," Appendix A of Biography, 535-39. Lewis provides the results of his investigation of the rumor and concludes that Wharton was most likely not illegitimate and did not originate the rumor herself. He entertains but dismisses the pertinent psychological reasons that she might have started the rumor.

22. I borrow the term "prodigal mother" from Tintner, "Mothers, Daughters, and Incest."

23. Little record seems to remain of Wharton's relationship to her own mother-in-law. R. W. B. Lewis reports that Teddy was living with his parents until his marriage and that he regarded his mother as "the most attractive woman I know." Biography, 50.

24. The pre-oedipal aspect of the relationship between Kate and Anne is described in Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot:

Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, 118-21. Although I find much to admire in this book, I cannot agree with its emphasis on maternal subjectivity in The Mother's Recompense . The mother-daughter relationship here is so peculiar, the mother herself so much an unsatisfied daughter, that the book does not readily serve as illustration of a mother's subjectivity. Nor is the lover shared by mother and daughter readily viewed as a male interloper; Chris Fenno derives his power from the desires of the two women.