“I’m not going to claim that it is a lost masterpiece of the American stage,” Rattray told me. They also hope that it will be enjoyed by Wharton aficionados, and beyond. 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. 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. (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. 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. The production was cancelled, however, and the work slipped into obscurity. 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. 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. 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.
“How I do wish I could run on to see the first rehearsal of the Shadow,” he wrote.Īt 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. 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.
The manuscript, which is the first full work of Wharton’s to be discovered in twenty-five years, was hiding in plain sight.
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