With Edith Wharton's Lenox, Cornelia Brooke Gilder adds to her impressive and comprehensive books about the social, literary, and architectural history of central Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Coauthor with Richard Jackson of Houses of the Berkshires, 1870–1930 (2006; rev. 2011) and The Lenox Club: Sesquicentennial History (2014); and with Julia Conklin Peters of Hawthorne's Lenox (2008), Gilder has a gift for telling stories about the people who built and inhabited Lenox and its surrounding towns. She is superb at combing archives for relevant letters and documents and poring over local newspapers, and she can evidently charm strangers into producing ancient family photograph albums from dusty attics. At this point I should acknowledge that I know Gilder and have attended several lectures about the materials she has brought together in this book.
Clearly a work of local history, Edith Wharton's Lenox is designed as a series of short chapters about various...
