The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories
1908
Edith Wharton steps out of the Gilded Age drawing rooms and into the wilderness. The title story of this 1908 collection follows a hermit who has fled the violence of his past for the solitude of a cave, where he devotes himself to religious practice and hard-won peace. That peace shatters when a wild woman, fleeing armed marauders, takes refuge with him. What unfolds is a collision between the sacred and the profane, between the hermit's carefully constructed faith and his sudden, destabilizing empathy. The other stories in this collection extend Wharton's gaze into the strange territories of solitude, spiritual crisis, and the moral complexities that arise when the world intrudes upon one's carefully maintained distance from it. This is Wharton unbuttoned: rawer, more interested in the soul than the salon, wrestling with questions of redemption and sin that her society novels could only hint at.
