Roman Fever Study Guide

Edith Wharton was born Edith Jones, the only daughter of a wealthy and powerful family in the upper echelons of New York society. She spent much of her childhood and adolescence touring and studying in Europe. She married Edward Robbins Wharton at the age of 23. Despite restrictions placed on her due to her gender, Wharton published a successful nonfiction book, The Decoration of Houses, in 1897. A lover of architecture, gardening, and the decorative arts, Wharton devoted a great deal of time and care to designing “The Mount,” her home in Lenox, Massachusetts. During the ten years she lived at The Mount, Wharton wrote some of her most important works of fiction, including The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911). Following her divorce in 1913, Wharton moved to France, where she devoted herself both to writing and to humanitarian causes. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her service to the country during World War I. Wharton continued to write and publish extensively throughout her life, and in 1921 became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was also the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University, and to receive full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Wharton died in France in 1937 at the age of 75.

Wharton was living in Paris when World War I began in 1914. Rather than return to the relative safety of the United States, she chose to stay in Europe in order to offer humanitarian assistance and to report on the events of the war from the frontlines. Although “Roman Fever” does not deal directly with the war, readers can be certain that Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade have felt its effects in their own lives. Some of the differences Mrs. Slade perceives between the Rome she knew in her youth and Rome as it appears to her in middle age may be testaments to the ravaging mental and emotional impacts of the war. Separately, the history of the disease known as Roman Fever (a particularly deadly strain of malaria) is also important context for understanding the story. Rome has a long history of being afflicted by periodic outbreaks of Roman Fever—one of which is even credited with helping to bring about the fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century AD. In Wharton’s story, Mrs. Slade takes inspiration from a grim story about an outbreak of Roman Fever that afflicted a previous generation.

Wharton’s cutting take on the lives of the upper classes owes a debt to the social novels of the Victorian era, most notably the work of Jane Austen. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility both portray a similarly convoluted game of courtship involving duplicitous characters. Additionally, many of the short stories and novels of Wharton’s close friend and contemporary Henry James—most notably The Portrait of a Lady—chronicle the lives of Americans in Europe during this same historical period.