Bunner Sisters (Annotated) E-Book

Edith Wharton

• Herausgeber: ePembaBooks
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

Originally published in 1916, “Bunner Sisters” is a novella by American author Edith Wharton. Inexplicably, this work has had a long history of being overlooked. Rejected twice by Scribner’s because of its length and its ‘ being unsuitable to serial publication’, it was eventually published in the collection “ Xingu and Other Stories” and is now considered an essential work of American literature.

"Bunner Sisters" takes place in a shabby neighbourhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's female population.
Ann Eliza gives Evelina a clock for her birthday. The purchase introduces them to the clockmaker, Mr. Ramy, and sets them on a course that will change their lives forever.

Leseprobe

Edith Wharton

Bunner Sisters

Table of contents

Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

BUNNER SISTERS

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part 2

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Edith Wharton, the feminism of a Pulitzer Prize winner

Literature has been consolidated over time as a small oasis for many writers and readers. Many saw and see in the pages of a book an escape from the routine and boredom characteristic of the society that surrounds them. Edith Wharton was also aware of this. Edith Wharton, a well-known figure in American literature, received the call of writing from childhood. The writer's childhood and youth clearly marked her literary repertoire. These periods were characterized by the writer's loneliness, with an artificial mother, a distant father and a subsequent marriage of convenience that was defined by the author as one of her greatest mistakes and that would end in divorce years later. It was not until her encounter with the opera singer Camilla, when Wharton met true love. Her life, like that of many women of the time and later, was divided between her literary ambitions and the demands she encountered in the private sphere. Her fierce character made her a woman too different for her time, in the eyes not only of her husband, but also in the eyes of acquaintances and colleagues. The patrician New York in which she was born, raised and educated, was the main framework that inspired the criticism present in her novels, as well as her personal experiences and misfortunes were the basis of all her works. Undoubtedly, Edith Wharton's work marked a fundamental time in the transition to the European genre novel in American literature. In her novels we find a fierce criticism of the hostile economic and social laws that only generated benefits for a privileged few, as well as a clear social and sexual confinement characteristic of her protagonists. Thus, we observe in the same all kinds of issues related to the private sphere between men and women, whether adultery, restricted passion or marital conflicts. The work that brought Wharton the most fame and recognition was "The Age of Innocence", which received a warm welcome. The Times Book Review itself dedicated an article to this work " a brilliant panorama of the New York of 45 years ago. The most requested novel in public libraries and a best seller in bookstores". In addition to this masterpiece, three earlier novels that tell the stories of women of her time are considered by many to be Wharton's true masterpieces, "Sanctuary" (1903), "The House of Mirth" (1905) and “ Bunner Sisters” (1916). Edith Wharton's style had little or nothing to do with that of Henry James, her great friend, since it was characterized above all by a more realistic attitude in relation to the meticulous description of the chores and social changes of American life and society. One of the main characteristics of her work is the frequent use of irony. Born into the upper class of prewar society, Wharton became one of the most astute critics of this social group. As a result of her great work, Edith Wharton won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1920, and in 1923 she was named Doctor honoris causa by Yale University.

Leaving the novel "The Buccaneers" unfinished, Wharton died in 1937. Her last work was finished by Marion Mainwaring who found the synopsis and notes that the author left written. Wharton became with the passage of time an essential in the world of literature and a passionate critic of injustice and social inequality.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

BUNNER SISTERS

Edith Wharton

Part 1

Chapter 1

In the days when New York's traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of Music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.

It was a very small shop, in a shabby basement, in a side- street already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the window-pane, and the brevity of the sign surmounting it (merely "Bunner Sisters" in blotchy gold on a black ground) it would have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried on within. But that was of little consequence, since its fame was so purely local that the customers on whom its existence depended were almost congenitally aware of the exact range of "goods" to be found at Bunner Sisters'.

The house of which Bunner Sisters had annexed the basement was a private dwelling with a brick front, green shutters on weak hinges, and a dress-maker's sign in the window above the shop. On each side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with fronts of brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These houses too had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refuse- barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its curtainless windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were not exacting in their tastes; though they doubtless indulged in as much fastidiousness as they could afford to pay for, and rather more than their landlord thought they had a right to express.

These three houses fairly exemplified the general character of the street, which, as it stretched eastward, rapidly fell from shabbiness to squalor, with an increasing frequency of projecting sign-boards, and of swinging doors that softly shut or opened at the touch of red-nosed men and pale little girls with broken jugs. The middle of the street was full of irregular depressions, well adapted to retain the long swirls of dust and straw and twisted paper that the wind drove up and down its sad untended length; and toward the end of the day, when traffic had been active, the fissured pavement formed a mosaic of coloured hand-bills, lids of tomato-cans, old shoes, cigar-stumps and banana skins, cemented together by a layer of mud, or veiled in a powdering of dust, as the state of the weather determined.

The sole refuge offered from the contemplation of this depressing waste was the sight of the Bunner Sisters' window. Its panes were always well-washed, and though their display of artificial flowers, bands of scalloped flannel, wire hat-frames, and jars of home-made preserves, had the undefinable greyish tinge of objects long preserved in the show-case of a museum, the window revealed a background of orderly counters and white-washed walls in pleasant contrast to the adjoining dinginess.

The Bunner sisters were proud of the neatness of their shop and content with its humble prosperity. It was not what they had once imagined it would be, but though it presented but a shrunken image of their earlier ambitions it enabled them to pay their rent and keep themselves alive and out of debt; and it was long since their hopes had soared higher.

Now and then, however, among their greyer hours there came one not bright enough to be called sunny, but rather of the silvery twilight hue which sometimes ends a day of storm. It was such an hour that Ann Eliza, the elder of the firm, was soberly enjoying as she sat one January evening in the back room which served as bedroom, kitchen and parlour to herself and her sister Evelina. In the shop the blinds had been drawn down, the counters cleared and the wares in the window lightly covered with an old sheet; but the shop-door remained unlocked till Evelina, who had taken a parcel to the dyer's, should come back.

In the back room a kettle bubbled on the stove, and Ann Eliza had laid a cloth over one end of the centre table, and placed near the green-shaded sewing lamp two tea-cups, two plates, a sugar-bowl and a piece of pie. The rest of the room remained in a greenish shadow which discreetly veiled the outline of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead surmounted by a chromo of a young lady in a night-gown who clung with eloquently-rolling eyes to a crag described in illuminated letters as the Rock of Ages; and against the unshaded windows two rocking-chairs and a sewing-machine were silhouetted on the dusk.

Ann Eliza, her small and habitually anxious face smoothed to unusual serenity, and the streaks of pale hair on her veined temples shining glossily beneath the lamp, had seated herself at the table, and was tying up, with her usual fumbling deliberation, a knobby object wrapped in paper. Now and then, as she struggled with the string, which was too short, she fancied she heard the click of the shop-door, and paused to listen for her sister; then, as no one came, she straightened her spectacles and entered into renewed conflict with the parcel. In honour of some event of obvious importance, she had put on her double-dyed and triple- turned black silk. Age, while bestowing on this garment a patine worthy of a Renaissance bronze, had deprived it of whatever curves the wearer's pre-Raphaelite figure had once been able to impress on it; but this stiffness of outline gave it an air of sacerdotal state which seemed to emphasize the importance of the occasion.

Seen thus, in her sacramental black silk, a wisp of lace turned over the collar and fastened by a mosaic brooch, and her face smoothed into harmony with her apparel, Ann Eliza looked ten years younger than behind the counter, in the heat and burden of the day. It would have been as difficult to guess her approximate age as that of the black silk, for she had the same worn and glossy aspect as her dress; but a faint tinge of pink still lingered on her cheek-bones, like the reflection of sunset which sometimes colours the west long after the day is over.

When she had tied the parcel to her satisfaction, and laid it with furtive accuracy just opposite her sister's plate, she sat down, with an air of obviously-assumed indifference, in one of the rocking-chairs near the window; and a moment later the shop-door opened and Evelina entered.

The younger Bunner sister, who was a little taller than her elder, had a more pronounced nose, but a weaker slope of mouth and chin. She still permitted herself the frivolity of waving her pale hair, and its tight little ridges, stiff as the tresses of an Assyrian statue, were flattened under a dotted veil which ended at the tip of her cold-reddened nose. In her scant jacket and skirt of black cashmere she looked singularly nipped and faded; but it seemed possible that under happier conditions she might still warm into relative youth.

"Why, Ann Eliza," she exclaimed, in a thin voice pitched to chronic fretfulness, "what in the world you got your best silk on for?"

Ann Eliza had risen with a blush that made her steel-browed spectacles incongruous.

"Why, Evelina, why shouldn't I, I sh'ld like to know? Ain't it your birthday, dear?" She put out her arms with the awkwardness of habitually repressed emotion.

Evelina, without seeming to notice the gesture, threw back the jacket from her narrow shoulders.

"Oh, pshaw," she said, less peevishly. "I guess we'd better give up birthdays. Much as we can do to keep Christmas nowadays."

"You hadn't oughter say that, Evelina. We ain't so badly off as all that. I guess you're cold and tired. Set down while I take the kettle off: it's right on the boil."