![]() It was like some dark undefinable menace, forever dogging my steps, lurking, & threatening.” She was afraid of the dark and of being alone. “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. The “perilous” story, and perhaps its link to her illness, stayed with Wharton for years. ![]() 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.” “To an unimaginative child the tale would no doubt have been harmless,” she wrote. ![]() The book she acquired was a “robber-story,” and it sent Wharton into an unexpected panic. 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. “During my convalescence, my one prayer was to be allowed to read,” she wrote in “Life & I,” an autobiography that was published posthumously. Confined to her bed, week after week, she wished most fervently not for recovery but for books. When Edith Wharton was nine years old she contracted typhoid fever and fell gravely ill. ![]()
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