A Granted Prayer
Editor’s Note: While doing postdoctoral research for a project on Edith Wharton’s short fiction, Sarah Whitehead, an independent scholar in London, came across the typescript of an unpublished story, titled “A Granted Prayer,” in the Wharton archive at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale. This satire of genteel stuffiness—which takes comic aim at contemporaneous debates about the role of environment, biology, and free will in human development—is set in Hillbridge, a fictional university town that features in at least four other Wharton stories and her novella The Touchstone, all written between 1898 and 1911. Whitehead dates “A Granted Prayer” to that same period, in the first half of a fiction-writing career that began in 1891 and continued until Wharton’s death in 1937. The original spelling and punctuation have been preserved.
I.
The academic triumphs of Professor Augustus Merrick of Hillbridge University were offset by a painful domestic trial: his three sons had been a disappointment.
As each in turn emerged from the nursery chrysalis, he had been eagerly watched by an anxious father, an adoring elder sister, and a pair of tender and vigilant aunts; but not one had developed the least germ of artistic or intellectual feeling. Harold had early affirmed his intention of going into the Navy; Fred, after several years of golf and vacillation, had lapsed into marriage and a clerkship in a bank; and Armstrong, the youngest and most promising, had crowned a deplorable college career by becoming a successful stock-broker.
“I don’t understand it,” poor Lucy Merrick used to say to her aunts, as they “talked the boys over” in the quiet Hillbridge drawing-room, with its sad-coloured walls hung with photographs after Benozzo Gozzoli and Burne-Jones. “I shall never understand why, with all their opportunities, all three of the poor dear boys should be such failures. Of course one doesn’t love them any the less—” It was not set in Lucy Merrick’s heart to love anyone less; the only difference she knew how to make was to love more.
