Edith Wharton's Pornographic (and Possibly Incestuous) Short Story

There's no sex in Edith Wharton's best known work. Her Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence chronicles a decades-long affair between a man and his wife's cousin—where the two lovers don't so much as kiss. In Ethan Frome, a married man and his would-be mistress decide to kill themselves rather than succumb to the temptation to sleep with each other. Her short story "Roman Fever" uses an illegitimate child as a plot device—but does not describe any of the out-of-wedlock sexual activity that went into producing it.

Literary types get excited, then, when they discover Wharton's more explicitly erotic work. Jezebel's Anna North has unearthed a "prose fragment" from a story called "Beatrice Palmato" that Lapham's Quarterly published last winter. North introduces the two-page story with the promise, "Check out the Wharton you didn't read in English class."

Indeed, this excerpt would likely make May Welland (The Age of Innocence's pure heroine) blush if she read it:



But it also could make today's readers feel sick if they knew the backstory—a 2001 New Yorker article suggests the two lovers are, in fact, father and daughter. Maybe there's a reason "Beatrice Palmato" doesn't show up on most English class reading lists...

Read the full story at Jezebel.

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Eleanor Barkhorn is a former senior editor at The Atlantic.

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