The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Margaret Jay Jessee as Editor of Volume 8, The Valley of Decision.

Margaret Jay Jessee is Associate Professor of English and Director of English Undergraduate Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is the author of Female Physicians in American Literature: Abortion in 19^th-Century Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2022).  Her work on Wharton has appeared in JML: Journal of Modern Literature, Critical Insights: Edith Wharton (edited by Myrto Drizou, Salem Press, 2017), and The Age of Innocence: New Centennial Essays (edited by Arielle Zibrak, Bloomsbury Press, 2019). She co-directed Edith Wharton’s New York conference with Margaret Toth in 2020. She is currently the secretary of the Edith Wharton Society and will begin her term as Vice President in January 2023.

The Complete Works of Edith Wharton Welcomes Gianfranca Balestra as Co-Editor of Volume 29, Translations and Adaptations.

Gianfranca Balestra was Full Professor of American Literature at the University of Siena, Italy. She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, with monographs on Edith Wharton, Edgar Allan Poe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her latest book Riflessi del Grande Gatsby. Traduzioni, cinema, teatro, musica (Rome: Artemide, 2019) analyzes the numerous Italian translations of Fitzgerald’s novel as well as its film, theater and music adaptations. Her scholarship on Wharton includes a book on the ghost stories (I fantasmi di Edith Wharton, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), the editing with Introductions of Italian translations of The Reef and The Touchstone, and nearly two dozen essays and reviews. Some of these articles discuss Wharton’s works related to Italy (such as The Valley of Decision, Italian Backgrounds, Italian Villas and their Gardens, and poems about Italian art), are published in Italian, and represent a significant contribution to the writer’s reception in Italy.  Many of her articles in English have appeared in international journals and various collections of essays. Among these: “What the Children Knew: The Manuscript of Disintegration, An Unfinished Novel” (1995), “’For the Use of the Magazine Morons’: Edith Wharton Rewrites the Tale of the Fantastic” (1996), “Edith Wharton’s Italian Tale: Language Exercise and Social Discourse” (1999), “Women Writers on the Verge of the Twentieth Century: Edith Wharton et.al.” (2014). Gianfranca  Balestra is co-editor, for the part on Italian translations, of vol. 29 Translations and Adaptations in The Complete Works of Edith Wharton, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Courtesy of Western Michigan University

CWEWh welcomes Katherine Joslin as the Volume Editor for volume 11, The Fruit of the Tree. Katherine Joslin is a professor in the Department of English at Western Michigan University. Her books include Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion in the Becoming Modern Series (University Press of New England, 2009);  Jane Addams, A Writer’s Life (Illinois, 2004; paperback 2009), a literary biography that places the social settlement founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate in the company of American writers; and Edith Wharton in the Women Writers Series (Macmillan and St. Martin’s, 1991; paperback 1994), a part of the resurgence in Wharton studies (Joslin is a founding member of the Edith Wharton Society). She co-edited Wretched Exotic: Essays on Wharton in Europe (Peter Lang 1993; paperback 1996), a selection of essays from a conference she directed in Paris; and American Feminism (Routledge, 2003), a four-volume collection of source documents from 1848 to 1920.