‘Literature’ or the Various Forms of Autobiography

Abstract

In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, published in 1934, Wharton describes in topographical terms the elation she felt at the publication of her first collection of short stories:

At last I had groped my way through to my vocation, and thereafter never questioned that story-telling was my job, though I doubted whether I should be able to cross the chasm which separated the nouvelle from the novel. Meanwhile I felt like some homeless waif who, after trying for years to take out naturalization papers, and being rejected by every country, has finally acquired a nationality. The Land of Letters was hence forth to be my country and I gloried in my new citizenship.¹