Martin Williams
Member
I'll gladly second many of the recommendations made above but I'm happy to add some of my own!
As far as fictional treatments go, I'd put a fair number of Edith Wharton's novels at the top of the list. Her most famous work, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'The Age of Innocence', is set in the Old New York of the 1870s and Wharton continued to write until the end of her life, sometimes setting her stories in the modern day (that is, in the inter-war years), but the action of the majority of her novels takes place in the 1900s and early 1910s. The exquisite and agonising 'The House of Mirth' hit the shelves around 1905 and is by far my personal favourite - it certainly secured Wharton's reputation as the 'grande dame' of American literature. 'The Custom of the Country', telling of the havoc wreaked in high society by the beautiful and unscrupulous Undine Spragg, was a best-seller in 1913. Wharton was a meticulous chronicler of the manners and mores of her peers and often portrayed the devastating impact of social pressures on the 'inner lives' of her protagonists. Her last work, 'The Buccaneers', is the only one to deal at length with the experience of newly-moneyed American beauties marrying into the English aristocracy of the 1870s and 1880s, but it is none the less wonderful for being unfinished at the time of Wharton's death. It has recently been completed by at least two separate authors - I've read both versions and the one produced to accompany the BBC dramatisation of 1995 is vastly superior to the other.
Wharton's partial (in the sense that she wrote it in middle age) autobiography, 'A Backward Glance', reads just as well as one of her novels and is filled with luscious details about fashionable and intellectual life at the turn-of-the-century.
Henry James, Wharton's close friend and compatriot who, like her, moved in the higher ranks of sophisticated Anglo-American Society, still commands more respect from students and critics of English literature but the prose style of some of his later works is particularly ponderous - even painfully so. You'll need a very clear head and no distractions before embarking on 'The Wings of the Dove' (1902) or 'The Golden Bowl' (1904)! Both Wharton and James wrote about life in precisely the kind of cultivated, cosmopolitan milieu inhabited by 'Titanic' passenger Frank Millet - I always think of him whenever I read one of their novels.
More recent works set in the Edwardian Era include L.P. Hartley's 'The Go-Between' of 1953, which brilliantly evokes the sun-drenched summer of 1900, and the sexual and social tensions smouldering between the classes, and Isabel Colegate's 'The Shooting Party', which takes place on a country estate in the autumn of 1913. Both books are firm favourites of mine and have been adapted for the big-screen. The 1970 version of 'The Go-Between', starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie, is a rare example of a film that is every bit as good as the book which inspired it. 'The Shooting Party', dating from the mid-Eighties, has an all-star cast and the book has recently been re-published in the UK with a foreword by professional toff, Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for his screen-play for the Robert Altman film, 'Gosford Park'.
Although he is chiefly associated with the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s, it is worth noting that F. Scott Fitzgerald's earlier works are set in the America of the 1910s. I was very much struck by this as I read 'The Beautiful and Damned', which makes many detailed references to the fads and fashions galvanising New York Society in the period leading up to and during World War One.
Aside from Edith Wharton's 'Backward Glance', my favourite memoir of the Gilded Age is, most fittingly, our very own Lady Duff Gordon's 'Discretions and Indiscretions' (1932). Second-hand copies are very hard to find, and prohibitively expensive, but I would advise anybody with more than a passing interest in late-Victorian and Edwardian fashion and Society to make the investment - you won't regret it! Consuelo Balsan's 'The Glitter and the Gold' is easily obtainable and is deservedly popular. Consuelo was the wealthiest and most celebrated of the Dollar Princess sold into marriage with titled Englishmen and her story contains splendour and sorrow in roughly equal measure. The antics of her cousin-by-marriage, the pathologically social Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, who assumed leadership of 'the Four Hundred' upon the death of Caroline Astor in 1908, are detailed, not entirely sympathetically, by her son in his book, 'Queen of the Gilded Age' (or alternatively 'Queen of the Golden Age' - I'm afraid I haven't got my copy to hand to check the exact title!)
Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners), the most famous beauty of her day, writes of her childhood and youth among the Edwardian elite in 'The Rainbow Comes and Goes' but I find her style to be a little too precious and smug for my taste...she includes far too many of the frankly tedious love-letters she exchanged during the Great War with her future husband, Duff!
Anita Leslie's 'Edwardians in Love' is a never less than delightful exploration of the amorous adventures (and misadventures) of the Souls and Marlborough House Set, from the 1860s until 1910. The author was the great-niece of Lady Randolph Churchill and benefitted immeasurably from the family gossip passed on down the generations.
As far as fictional treatments go, I'd put a fair number of Edith Wharton's novels at the top of the list. Her most famous work, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 'The Age of Innocence', is set in the Old New York of the 1870s and Wharton continued to write until the end of her life, sometimes setting her stories in the modern day (that is, in the inter-war years), but the action of the majority of her novels takes place in the 1900s and early 1910s. The exquisite and agonising 'The House of Mirth' hit the shelves around 1905 and is by far my personal favourite - it certainly secured Wharton's reputation as the 'grande dame' of American literature. 'The Custom of the Country', telling of the havoc wreaked in high society by the beautiful and unscrupulous Undine Spragg, was a best-seller in 1913. Wharton was a meticulous chronicler of the manners and mores of her peers and often portrayed the devastating impact of social pressures on the 'inner lives' of her protagonists. Her last work, 'The Buccaneers', is the only one to deal at length with the experience of newly-moneyed American beauties marrying into the English aristocracy of the 1870s and 1880s, but it is none the less wonderful for being unfinished at the time of Wharton's death. It has recently been completed by at least two separate authors - I've read both versions and the one produced to accompany the BBC dramatisation of 1995 is vastly superior to the other.
Wharton's partial (in the sense that she wrote it in middle age) autobiography, 'A Backward Glance', reads just as well as one of her novels and is filled with luscious details about fashionable and intellectual life at the turn-of-the-century.
Henry James, Wharton's close friend and compatriot who, like her, moved in the higher ranks of sophisticated Anglo-American Society, still commands more respect from students and critics of English literature but the prose style of some of his later works is particularly ponderous - even painfully so. You'll need a very clear head and no distractions before embarking on 'The Wings of the Dove' (1902) or 'The Golden Bowl' (1904)! Both Wharton and James wrote about life in precisely the kind of cultivated, cosmopolitan milieu inhabited by 'Titanic' passenger Frank Millet - I always think of him whenever I read one of their novels.
More recent works set in the Edwardian Era include L.P. Hartley's 'The Go-Between' of 1953, which brilliantly evokes the sun-drenched summer of 1900, and the sexual and social tensions smouldering between the classes, and Isabel Colegate's 'The Shooting Party', which takes place on a country estate in the autumn of 1913. Both books are firm favourites of mine and have been adapted for the big-screen. The 1970 version of 'The Go-Between', starring Alan Bates and Julie Christie, is a rare example of a film that is every bit as good as the book which inspired it. 'The Shooting Party', dating from the mid-Eighties, has an all-star cast and the book has recently been re-published in the UK with a foreword by professional toff, Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for his screen-play for the Robert Altman film, 'Gosford Park'.
Although he is chiefly associated with the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s, it is worth noting that F. Scott Fitzgerald's earlier works are set in the America of the 1910s. I was very much struck by this as I read 'The Beautiful and Damned', which makes many detailed references to the fads and fashions galvanising New York Society in the period leading up to and during World War One.
Aside from Edith Wharton's 'Backward Glance', my favourite memoir of the Gilded Age is, most fittingly, our very own Lady Duff Gordon's 'Discretions and Indiscretions' (1932). Second-hand copies are very hard to find, and prohibitively expensive, but I would advise anybody with more than a passing interest in late-Victorian and Edwardian fashion and Society to make the investment - you won't regret it! Consuelo Balsan's 'The Glitter and the Gold' is easily obtainable and is deservedly popular. Consuelo was the wealthiest and most celebrated of the Dollar Princess sold into marriage with titled Englishmen and her story contains splendour and sorrow in roughly equal measure. The antics of her cousin-by-marriage, the pathologically social Grace Wilson Vanderbilt, who assumed leadership of 'the Four Hundred' upon the death of Caroline Astor in 1908, are detailed, not entirely sympathetically, by her son in his book, 'Queen of the Gilded Age' (or alternatively 'Queen of the Golden Age' - I'm afraid I haven't got my copy to hand to check the exact title!)
Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners), the most famous beauty of her day, writes of her childhood and youth among the Edwardian elite in 'The Rainbow Comes and Goes' but I find her style to be a little too precious and smug for my taste...she includes far too many of the frankly tedious love-letters she exchanged during the Great War with her future husband, Duff!
Anita Leslie's 'Edwardians in Love' is a never less than delightful exploration of the amorous adventures (and misadventures) of the Souls and Marlborough House Set, from the 1860s until 1910. The author was the great-niece of Lady Randolph Churchill and benefitted immeasurably from the family gossip passed on down the generations.
