The New Yorker:

When Edith Wharton was nine years old she contracted typhoid fever and fell gravely ill. Confined to her bed, week after week, she wished most fervently not for recovery but for books. “During my convalescence, my one prayer was to be allowed to read,” she wrote in “Life & I,” an autobiography that was published posthumously. Her mother was particular about reading material—Wharton had to ask for permission to read novels until her marriage, in 1885—but on this occasion she got the goods. The book she acquired was a “robber-story,” and it sent Wharton into an unexpected panic. “To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless,” she wrote. But “with my intense Celtic sense of the super-natural, tales of robbers & ghosts were perilous reading.” She relapsed, and when she woke, “it was to enter a world haunted by formless horrors.”

The “perilous” story, and perhaps its link to her illness, stayed with Wharton for years. “I had been a naturally fearless child; now I lived in a state of chronic fear,” she wrote in “Life & I.” “Fear of what? I cannot say—& even at the time, I was never able to formulate my terror. It was like some dark undefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking, & threatening.” She was afraid of the dark and of being alone. She hated to be left waiting outside. Only when she was nearing thirty—long after she became a “ ‘young lady’ with long skirts and my hair up,” as she wrote—and on her way to winning the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Age of Innocence,” could she sleep in a house that contained a book of ghost stories. “I have frequently had to burn books of this kind,” she wrote, “because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!”

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