In February of 1901, Walter Berry, a lawyer and member of élite society in New York, expressed a regret in a letter written to his close friend Edith Wharton. “How I do wish I could run on to see the first rehearsal of the Shadow,” he wrote.
At the time, Wharton, who was thirty-nine years old, was not yet a novelist, having only published shorter fiction and poetry, as well as co-authoring, with Ogden Codman, “The Decoration of Houses,” an 1897 book about interior design. But she was a budding playwright, and, as two scholars have just deduced in an important bit of detective work, Berry’s glancing reference was to one of her works: “The Shadow of a Doubt,” a three-act play that was in production in 1901. It was to star Elsie de Wolfe as Wharton’s heroine, Kate Derwent, a former nurse married to John Derwent, a gentleman above her social station. Kate’s role in assisting the suicide of her husband’s former wife, Agnes, whom she tended to after an injury, is revealed in the course of the drama.
The production was cancelled, however, and the work slipped into obscurity. It is not mentioned by any of Wharton’s biographers, nor does Wharton mention it in her own memoir, “A Backward Glance,” in which, perhaps understandably, she skates over her brief and not especially successful career as a writer for the stage. (In the first years of the century, she had written a handful of plays, but “The Shadow of a Doubt” would have been her first professional production, had it materialized. Later, she collaborated on an adaptation of “The House of Mirth,” which proved less successful than hoped.) It has now come to light thanks to the sleuthing of two scholars, Laura Rattray, who is a reader in American literature at the University of Glasgow, and Mary Chinery, a professor of English at Georgian Court University, in New Jersey. They are publishing their findings in the new issue of the Edith Wharton Review, and hope that the play’s discovery will shed new light on the period of Wharton’s life before her ascent to literary fame, as well as illuminating her better known works in previously unimagined ways. They also hope that it will be enjoyed by Wharton aficionados, and beyond. “I’m not going to claim that it is a lost masterpiece of the American stage,” Rattray told me. “But it has a really interesting female character at the core, and there are lots of witty one-liners.”
The manuscript, which is the first full work of Wharton’s to be discovered in twenty-five years, was not stowed away in an attic, as was the case with another significant Wharton discovery of the past few years, that of a cache of letters written to her governess, Anna Bahlmann. Rather, it had been hiding in plain sight at the Harry Ransom Center, a repository for rare manuscripts in Austin, Texas, where Rattray and Chinery found two copies of it in the Playscripts and Promptbooks Collection. The scholars met last summer, at a conference devoted to Wharton, where both were presenting on Wharton’s writing for the theatre. They teamed up to pursue a lead: Chinery, searching in the Times’s online archive, had come upon a news item about the 1901 production, saying that the show had been postponed in order to allow Wharton to “strengthen some of the roles.”
Chinery and Rattray suspect that this may have been a ruse on the part of the show’s producer, Charles Frohman, to drop it from his schedule. They also speculate that the role of Kate was judged to be an insufficiently starry vehicle for Elsie de Wolfe, of whom Janet Flanner, writing in a Profile in this magazine, observed, “her adequacy as an actress was always buried under her reputation as the only leading lady with a Paris wardrobe.” After retiring from the stage a few years later, de Wolfe went on to become a fashionable interior designer, really the first of the breed. It would take a novelist to imagine the backstage conversations about drapes and vases that might have taken place between de Wolfe and Wharton, whose book with Codman was a pioneering work in the field.
Whatever the reasons for its cancellation, the surviving manuscripts suggest that the work might have provoked controversy had it made it to opening night. Wharton’s treatment of the theme of euthanasia is suggestive, and Kate Derwent’s actions are portrayed as humane, not callous. Wharton would return to the theme of what would now be called assisted suicide in her “The Fruit of the Tree,” the novel she published in 1907. Hitherto, critics have assumed that Wharton’s interest in the subject was prompted by the deaths, in 1905, of two close friends, one of whom took her own life after a painful illness. “The Shadow of a Doubt” reveals that Wharton had been thinking for some time prior about the ethics and morality of assisted suicide.
The play also can be seen as a fascinating precursor of themes Wharton would go on to explore in her masterpiece, “The House of Mirth.” Through her characters, Wharton articulates arguments in favor of settling for a comfortable social hypocrisy, a subject that she would later return to in that novel. “Women who have quarreled with society at thirty have been glad to make up the quarrel at forty. The first wrinkle sends the penitent to the confessional,” remarks Lord Osterleigh, the father of the late Agnes, at one point. Kate Derwent is, in the play’s third act, separated from her husband and, like Lily Bart, living in substantially reduced circumstances in a boarding house. In one of the most compelling moments in the text, she is visited there by one Lady Uske, who has hitherto been conspiring with Lord Osterleigh in his campaign against Kate, but who now advises her to return to her husband: “My dear, after twenty, all life is pretending, and it’s easier to pretend in a good house, with everybody’s cards on the hall table, than alone in a garret under a false name!”
And despite the sensational elements in the drama—in addition to euthanasia, there is marital betrayal and the burning of important letters—Wharton sought to avoid the exploitative methods of melodrama. Rattray and Chinery note, “ ‘The Shadow of a Doubt’ is a play of gaps and omissions, with the most dramatic incidents . . . all left offstage.” Wharton’s contemporaries did not have the chance to see how successfully or not the drama worked, but Wharton fans may now have the opportunity to do so. Susan Wissler, the executive director of the Mount, Edith Wharton’s former home in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is now a cultural center, says that she hopes soon to present a staged reading, bringing the play out of the shadows at last.
