Mary C. M. Phillips

So, I have finally hopped onto the blogging bandwagon.

I’ve been encouraged from a fellow friend, WordPress blogger, and Edith Wharton aficionado to create a blog dedicated to this most curious, ingenious woman of letters, whose fiction, mostly novels and novellas, and a largely under-appreciated and abundant collection of short stories, even ghost stories, have populated classroom syllabi and personal reading lists alike, for all lovers of classic fiction.

This past March, Mary and I co-hosted a lecture that addressed what makes Wharton “tic”, and her resonating, piercing observations of the influences of society on both public and private lives. Even though the superficiality of the New York social circles of her time has largely “disappeared,” one living in today’s society may be surprised with how relevant these Wharton-esque nuances are to our contemporary, celebrity-obsessed, materialistic, and digital postmodern world.

The point of this blog will be to “resurrect” Wharton’s ideas and scathing insight…

Twenty-eighth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

John Baxter is Professor of English at Dalhousie University, where he teaches classes on Early Modern literature, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, rhetoric, and religion and literature. He’s the author of Shakespeare’s Poetic Styles: Verse Into Drama (Routledge) and many essays on Shakespeare, as well as on several other writers, including Ben Jonson, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis, Yvor Winters, Helen Pinkerton, and George Elliott Clarke. With Gordon Harvey, he edited a collection of essays by C.Q. Drummond called In Defense of Adam: Essays on Bunyan, Milton, and Others (Brynmill Press/Edgeways Books), and with J. Patrick Atherton, he edited George Whalley’s groundbreaking translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

He’s also my father, and I’m absolutely delighted to introduce his guest post on Fanny Price and Shakespeare for…