Tales of Men and Ghosts by WHARTON, Edith

Tales of Men and Ghosts was published as a collection in 1910, though the first eight of the stories had earlier appeared in Scribners and the last two in the Century Magazine. Despite the title, the men outnumber the ghosts, since only The Eyes and Afterward actually call on the supernatural. In only two of the stories are women the central characters, though elsewhere they play important roles. Wharton enjoys subjecting her subjects -- all of them American gentlemen and gentlewomen, in the conventional senses of the word -- to various moral tests and sometimes ironic tests. Some of the stories deal with the intellectual fashions of the day -- The Blond Beast basing itself, to some degree, on Nietzsche, and The Debt on variants of Darwinism. Though Afterward is set in England, and The Letters in France, the rest of the stories are squarely in Whartons own New York city, rather than (say) in what she calls the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, thus avoiding the need to come to terms with what fashion-conscious New Yorkers still today call fly-over country for everything that lies between the west bank of the Hudson River and San Francisco Bay. (Summary by Nicholas Clifford)