Edith Wharton contrived in her novels to sacrifice the portrait of "life
in time" to "life by value". But even granting this, one can observe
that the profound skill employed by Edith Wharton in moving specially
her female characters through large areas and epochs is used not
primarily in order to guarantee their 'reality', but to suggest the
essential rootlessness and restlessness that characterise woman's, nay
man's existence in modern world. Her novels are not peripheral to the
central facts of American experience. They are an integral part of the
social world. Her fiction is nothing short of an "all over" picture,
where every inch is charged with line and colour and the total
metamorphosis of the surface presents textual and material canvass that
depicts symbols of a larger reality. The considerable value of her
novels as social documents cannot be denied. Like a great artist, Edith
Wharton integrates her sense of the amoral individual into a carefully
controlled moral context and her fiction can be viewed as "a telescope
upon a tower" which seems to correct false social history and to provide
meaning to social life.