The Lady Maid’s Bell Study Guide

Edith Wharton, née Edith Newbold Jones, was born in New York City into a prominent, affluent family, and the upper-class world in which she grew up and lived was frequently the subject of her fiction and poetry. Although Wharton began writing stories and poems as a teenager, her first significant publications did not come until the turn of the 20th century, when she wrote many of her most famous works, including the novels The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1912), and The Age of Innocence (1920). By this time Wharton had married and moved to Massachusetts, but financial difficulties and her husband’s increasingly erratic behavior led to a troubled relationship—a subject Wharton would turn to often in her work. After receiving a divorce in 1913, Wharton moved to France, where she would live for the rest of her life. She played a major role in organizing relief efforts for refugees during the First World War, which broke out in 1914, and was honored for her efforts by the French government. The first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (for The Age of Innocence), Wharton won wide acclaim for her sharp, often satirically inflected depictions of upper-class American society in a time when the stifling culture she wrote of was receding into the past. She died in 1937 in France.

“The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” first published in 1902, emerges from the cultural context of the U.S.’s Gilded Age, a period of headlong growth, national expansion, and widespread corruption that lasted roughly from 1875 until the turn of the century. The social changes and technological innovations of the Gilded Age mark the story’s very first pages, in which readers learn that the narrator, Hartley, is a recent immigrant to the United States (possibly from the United Kingdom) and that she takes a train to her new place of employment. At the same time, the Gilded Age was characterized by a relatively rigid social hierarchy, a relic of a more aristocratic era in American history, and by a widespread sense of growing decadence and corruption—ideas that can be detected in Mr. Brympton’s cruelty and crude habits and in Mrs. Brympton’s illness and physical delicacy. It is also worth noting that there are some similarities between the Brymptons’ situation and that of Wharton herself: in the years leading up to the publication of “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” Wharton gave up traveling the world and moved with her husband into an enormous house in Massachusetts, only to find that their marriage was too troubled to survive.

One of Edith Wharton’s earliest published works, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” is steeped in the atmosphere of the “ghost story” genre that had gained popularity by the late 19th century—above all, in the atmosphere of the novella that most influenced Wharton, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). In the preface to her 1937 collection Ghosts, in which “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” was republished, Wharton lists the authors who influenced her approach to writing ghost stories, including Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Fitz James O’Brien, but she reserves a special place for James: “For imaginative handling of the supernatural no one, to my mind, has touched Henry James in ‘The Turn of the Screw.’” The influence of James can particularly be felt in the remote, gloomy, and oppressively quiet estate on which “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” is set and in Wharton’s portrayal of the ghost as a silent, grave, mysterious presence. In this respect, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” emerges as well from the Gothic and romantic traditions represented by Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), and is an important link in the chain of American supernatural fiction leading to H. P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson.