STUDIES AND REVIEWS Bookm. 51 ('20): 457. New Repub. 23 ('20): 156. See also _Book Review Digest_, 1920, 1921. +Rita Wellman (Mrs. Edgar F. Leo)+--dramatist. Born at Washington, D.C., 1890. Daughter of Walter Wellman, the airman and explorer. Educated in public schools and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. BIBLIOGRAPHY The Gentile Wife. 1919. Wings of Desire. 1919. (Novel.) Funiculi Funicula. 1919. (Mayorga.) +Edith (Newbold Jones) Wharton+--novelist, short-story writer. Born in New York City, 1862. Educated at home but spent much time abroad when she was young. Mrs. Wharton is a society woman and a great lover of outdoors and of animals. Chevalier of the Legion of Honor of France. SUGGESTIONS FOR READING 1. Mrs. Wharton's friendship with Henry James and the derivation of her methods from his suggest an interesting comparison of the work of these two writers. For this comparison, books treating of similar material should be chosen; for example, Mrs. Wharton's _The Custom of the Country_ or _Madame de Treymes_ with Mr. James's _Portrait of a Lady_ or _The Ambassadors_. The result will show that Mrs. Wharton, having an essentially different type of mind, has worked out an interesting set of variations of Mr. James's method. 2. Mrs. Wharton's novels of American social life should be studied and judged separately from her Italian historical novel (_The Valley of Decision_) and from her New England stories, _Ethan Frome_ and _Summer_. 3. Two special phases of Mrs. Wharton's work which call for study are her management of supernatural effects in some of her short stories and her use of satire. 4. Her short stories offer a basis of comparison with those of Mrs. Gerould (q.v.), another disciple of Mr. James. 5. Has Mrs. Wharton enough originality and enough distinction to hold a permanent high place as a novelist of American manners? 6. Use the following criticisms by Mr. Carl Van Doren as the basis of a critical judgment of your own. Decide whether he is in all respects right: From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the ability to reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or merely as social impossibility. She has always been singularly unpartisan, as if she recognized it as no duty of hers to do more for the herd or its members than to play over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of her magnificent irony.