In her 1925 collection of essays on craft, The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton reflected on the basis of her literary technique and her belief in the formal weaknesses of an emergent literary modernism. Coming towards the end of what scholars frequently recognise as her greatest period of production in fiction, beginning with The House of Mirth (1905) and topped off by The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton used her literary fame and the platform it gave her in The Writing of Fiction to question what she saw as an emerging cult of ‘originality’ whose values were drawn from a neo-romantic fixation on ‘inspiration’ and vanguardism, and a desire that new psychological fiction (Woolf, Joyce and Proust are particularly referenced) capture all that was subject to the senses in a given moment. For Wharton, this modernistic adoration of totality and aesthetic completeness was a hubris of sorts that found its style in the deployment of the uninterrupted, unimpeded Jamesian (William) ‘stream of consciousness’ that she loathed. Excluding materials from appearance in art, for Wharton, was not a withholding of one's right to see and feel all things, but was, rather, a generous and humble exercise that not only made art ‘better’ in her view, but also opened it up to other potentialities. These potentialities were experienced by the reader as a democratising sense of wonder as to how things might be different through the deployment of a different form or focus of attention. Rather than relying on the energy of the creative writer to capture all things at all times, Wharton's theory of art created drama through a certain exercise of modesty that could provoke the reader's contemplation as to other possible outcomes, forms and ways of being.