The Triumph of Night E-Book

Edith Wharton

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

An essential classic from beloved American author, Edith Wharton.

Leseprobe

THE TRIUMPH OF NIGHT

BY

Edith Wharton

This is a mystery plot in which the supernatural furnishes the interest. In dealing with the supernatural Mrs. Wharton does not allow it to become horrible or grotesque. She secures plausibility by having for its leading characters practical business men—not a woman, hysterical or otherwise, really appears—and by placing them in a perfectly conventional setting. The apparition is not accompanied by blood stains, shroud, or uncanny noises. Sometimes the writer of the supernatural feels that he must explain his mystery by material agencies. The effect is to disappoint the reader who has yielded himself to the conditions imposed by the author, and is willing, for the time at least, to believe in ghosts. Mrs. Wharton makes no such mistake. She does not spoil the effect by commonplace explanation.

In characterization Mrs. Wharton reveals the power not only to analyze subtly temperaments and motives, but also to describe vividly with a few words. This phrasal power is illustrated when she says of Faxon that he “had a healthy face, but dying hands,” and of Lavington that “his pinched smile was screwed to his blank face like a gas-light to a white-washed wall.”

THE TRIUMPH OF NIGHT

I

It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveller from Boston, who had so confidently counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of night-fall and winter.