Roman Fever: Short Story

By Edith Wharton

While visiting Rome with their daughters, two middle-aged women reminisce about their romantic rivalry for the dashing Delphin Slade. Although Mrs. Slade admits to falsifying the letter that led to her eventual marriage to Slade, Mrs. Ansley holds her own secret regarding the gentleman.

Written by esteemed American author Edith Wharton in 1934, “Roman Fever” was adapted into a play, as well as two operas.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781443435116

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was born in 1862 to a prominent and wealthy New York family. In 1885 she married Boston socialite 'Teddy' Wharton but the marriage was unhappy and they divorced in 1913. The couple travelled frequently to Europe and settled in France, where Wharton stayed until her death in 1937. Her first major novel was The House of Mirth (1905); many short stories, travel books, memoirs and novels followed, including Ethan Frome (1911) and The Reef (1912). She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with The Age of Innocence (1920) and she was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was also decorated for her humanitarian work during the First World War.

Book preview

Roman Fever

I

From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval.

As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. Well, come along, then, it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, and let’s leave the young things to their knitting, and a voice as fresh laughed back: "Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting— Well, I mean figuratively, rejoined the first. After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much else to do. . . ." At that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue.

The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and colored slightly.

Barbara! she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking voice in the stairway.

The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in color, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humored laugh. That’s what our daughters think of us.

Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. Not of us individually. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see— Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a

Reviews for Roman Fever

[lauren · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh man. The audacity of that ending was incredible. I aspire to be like Mrs. Ansley!

[gbill_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very nice collection of eight short stories from Edith Wharton, with three true gems: ‘Roman Fever’, ‘Xingu’, and ‘After Holbein’. As in much of Wharton’s oeuvre, you’ll find themes of the mores of Old New York society, the stigma of divorce, and characters feeling trapped by the situation they’re in. The build-up and ending to ‘Roman Fever’ is fantastic, and a reminder of just how good she was at finishing a story. Intellectual pretension is satirized in ‘Xingu’, and the sad effect of aging on the mind is haunting and touching in ‘After Holbein’. The stories were not originally published together, and looking up the when they were was interesting:Roman Fever (1934)Xingu (1911)The Other Two (1904)Souls Belated (1899)The Angel at the Grave (1901)The Last Asset (1904)After Holbein (1928)Autres Temps… (1916)It was also interesting to place them relative to Wharton’s timeline and what I consider her masterpieces: ‘The House of Mirth’ (1905), ‘The Reef’ (1912), her divorce at age 51 after 28 years of marriage (1913), Pulitzer Prize winning ‘The Age of Innocence’ (1920), and her death at age 75 (1937). ‘Souls Belated’ was among her earliest writing, and ‘Roman Fever’ among her last, so it’s a collection that spans her career. Quotes:On aging, from ‘After Holbein’:“Yes; his mind, at that moment, had been quite piercingly clear and perceptive; his eye had passed with a renovating glitter over every detail of the daily scene. He stood still for a minute under the leafless trees of the Mall, and looking about him with the sudden insight of age, understood that he had reached the time of life when Alps and cathedrals become as transient as flowers.”On identity, from ‘The Other Two’:“Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many directions. Alice Haskett – Alice Varick – Alice Waythorn – she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.”On the past, from ‘Autres Temps…’:“When she was alone, it was always the past that occupied her. She couldn’t get away from it, and she didn’t any longer care to. During her long years of exile she had made her terms with it, had learned to accept the fact that it would always be there, huge, obstructing, encumbering, bigger and more dominant that anything the future could ever conjure up. And, at any rate, she was sure of it, she understood it, knew how to reckon with it; she had learned to screen and manage and protect it as one does an afflicted member of one’s family.”On relationships, from ‘Souls Belated’:“They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational.”

[alanwpowers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Though I taught Flannery O’Connor stories as the best ever written, Wharton’s title story here competes, with the greatest ending ever. (Must avoid spoiler.) Roman fever was the warning of grandparents— probably malaria back then. The next generation warned kids not to go out for romantic entanglements. For Mrs Ansley in this story, prone to illness, she was warned not to go out after 4 PM, especially not to go out at night to the Coliseum where, though locked, lovers found admittance with bribes. Before her marriage, Mrs. A had been invited to that architectural ruin by the boyfriend, later to be the successful Wall Street lawyer, of the other woman here, who became Slade’s wife: but Mrs. Slade in fact had written the invite, assumed she had fooled the smaller woman, who was more beautiful in youth.Here EW elucidates the secret envy of old friends. Each feels, “she was rather sorry for her”(9). Wharton writes gems, like, “Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver”(10).“It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in mid-heaven”(13)and, “The clear heaven overhead was emptied of its gold. Dusk spread over it..”(18)All Wharton’s stories display her European upbringing, even touring a French border town during WWI (See my review of her travel book). The cover on my 1993 edition features a Parisian painting, (woman with “Cigarette” by Lebasque, Musée d’Orsay). Every story features society women in various competitive encounters, and of course Wharton’s house in the Berkshires, The Mount, gives expression to her status, including literary (she rode, conversed with Henry James in his early motorcar). Wharton and James are truly international, while Hemingway, writing in Italy and Paris, comes to us as quintessentially American.More hilarious than the great first story, the second, Xingu, exposes society women who restrict their Lunch Club to six. They assign books to read—avoiding the amusing (thus, the great). The latest admitee to the group, Mrs Roby, doesn’t read the work assigned, by the famous author who’s visiting. Yet she manages to confound that author, and indeed the whole group of six. Mrs. Leveret carries a pocket “Appropriate Allusions,” and can quote several until the group meets, when she can only recall one, from the Book of Job, which she has failed to find occasion for, though Melville did, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?”(30) Adding to the satire, EW here compares social conversation to war, “Miss Van Vluyck resolved to carry the war into the enemy’s camp”(35).“The Last Asset,” later in the collection, focuses on an older man who’s lived in Paris forever, despite shabby clothes, and typically American, knows no French, asks for the bill, “Gassong! L’addition, silver play” Garçon, l’addition, si vous plais (155). He is small and bald, eats at a low-cost place (rather like where we ate near Chariot d’Or decades ago, croque messieurs and a vin deux franc). Keeping obscure, he reads one local paper for examples of human folly, rather as I read the Venice’s Il Gazzetino, now online, but years ago newsprint, when living on the Lido, researching my books on Giordano Bruno. Garnett, his compadre at the low-cost place, knows a Mrs. Newell from NYC, who overspends and depends on her aristocratic acquaintances to put her up in the UK and France. Suddenly she needs her daughter’s dislocated father, since her daughter Hermy, Hermione, has landed a great French catch, an aristocrat no less. But the French require both parents at the marriage. Will the small, penniless father show up?The next story, “After Holbein,” shall end my review. Mrs. Jaspar, scion of society decades ago, features here with nurse and maid Lavinia. She uses the names of her early servants for her current ones, though they have changed. She insists on bringing out her expensive jewels from her safe—to which only the Butler knows the combination—in order to entertain dozens at her grand table, dozens who no longer arrive. Nor are the invitations she composed sent. The table is no longer set with gold plate, though the famous chandelier still hangs.Mrs. Jaspar criticizes her current servants, “‘Lavinia! My fan, my gloves, my handkerchief…how often do I have to tell you?I used to have the perfect maid—-‘Lavinia’s eyes brimmed, ‘That was me, madam.’”Of this scene, the nurse Cress told her friends, “To watch the two of them is better than any circus”(214).But the story begins with the most prominent of her guests, Anson Warley, small and witty years ago, so much invited that he gave up her grand parties “declining the boredom” as he told friends, hoping she would not hear. At any rate, Mr Warley accepts an invitation, finally, and is received for a dinner of mashed potato and spinach with wine, though not the vintages declared, and the food served on mere kitchen plates. I should note, though not specific to this story, that Wharton’s favorite adjective may be “petrified.”

[bookwoman247 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was a wonderful smorgasbord of delicious tidbits. I'm a fan of Edith Wharton, but I loved this collection of her short stories even more than I do the novels of hers I've read. Every story was a gem, and sparkled and shown in its own way.My favorites were the title story, Roman Fever, Xingu, and Autre Temps. The thread through several of the stories is societal mores - what are the boundaries, and what happens when those boundaries are crossed.Xingu was a jab at social and intellectual pretentions, and was almost told like a joke with a punchline. I saw the punchline coming a mile off, but I didn't mind, because it was such a great ride to get there.Anyone looking for an introduction to Edith Wharton could not do better than this. Neither could anyone looking for an outstanding short story collection.I loved this, and have added it to my always-growing list of favorites.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't often read short fiction; however, when I do I usually don't regret it. Such is the case with Roman Fever and Other Stories. The 8 stories in this book all take place in the early 20th century, and primarily in locations the author called home: New York City and Paris. The first two stories were my favorites:- Roman Fever is about two adult women who were both friends and rivals in their youth. Visiting Rome with their daughters (who are carrying forward the friend/rival dynamic), the older women fall into conversation about old times, around the time period they were each married. A painful situation is resurrected, and Wharton masterfully close the story with a surprising "slam-dunk."- Xingu is a highly amusing satire of a ladies' book club. This group of society women consider themselves intellectuals, and their "lunch club" is layered with social protocol and expectations. A visiting author is reluctant to discuss her work, and exposes the members' shallow intellect by asking probing questions to which they are unable to respond. One member "rescues" the event, and the consequences are very funny.The remaining stories are generally more poignant, and deal with difficult issues such as the impact of divorce on women. But each is well-written, exposing societal issues and making Wharton's position on these issues crystal clear. Recommended reading.