Once Upon a Time: Reading 'Roman Fever' by Edith Wharton

The story of the month: 'Roman Fever' by Edith Wharton

Link to the story: https://englishiva1011.pbworks.com/f/ROMFEVER.PDF

Link to the Google Meet: https://meet.google.com/tnt-fnkp-uhp

The meeting room will open 5 minutes before the session.

***

"A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it."

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Despite unwarranted reports of its demise at various times, the short story has been robust and thriving. The form itself has constantly changed, always reflecting the times it came out of, unlike the novel.

From the great short story writers – Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, O’Henry, and Saki – we moved to the more modern writers who brought a change in the middle of the twentieth century – Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver were at the forefront of this.

Once Upon a Time is a session in which we try to familiarise ourselves with the world's best short stories. Shankar will read the story aloud in the session. After the reading, we will analyse it together to learn from it.

But if you can, please read the story beforehand.

THE STORY: 'Roman Fever' by Edith Wharton

Two old friends, now widowed, sit on a Roman terrace one afternoon while their grown daughters are out enjoying the city, and their conversation drifts back to a shared trip to Rome decades earlier. What begins as polite reminiscence slowly tightens into something else entirely.

Link to the story: https://englishiva1011.pbworks.com/f/ROMFEVER.PDF

THE AUTHOR: Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born into New York's old aristocratic society — the very world she would spend her career anatomising. She wrote more than twenty novels and numerous story collections, winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1921, the first woman to do so. Her fiction is prized for its precision, irony, and unflinching eye on the gap between social appearance and private feeling.

THE HOST: Shankar is living in Pune and has been a lifelong reader and was bitten by the writing bug after reading stories by Tobias Wolff, Anton Chekhov, and William Trevor. While he loves novels, especially by the Russians, he always has a particular fondness for short stories.