{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.034619750283768444, 'fraction_numerical': 0.017593643586833144, 'mean_word_length': 4.7993421052631575, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Old New York’s Twin Rediscovered

Old New York (1924), Edith Wharton’s quartet of novellas, traces the history of her childhood world, decade by decade, from the 1860s through the 1890s. Neither the collection as a whole nor its component parts has attracted much attention, except for “The Old Maid,” the best of the four stories. Details about their publication may not improve the standing of Old New York in the Wharton canon, but they do place her transitioning career in the arena of the book trade. When D. Appleton and Company issued a second tetralogy in 1931, with the parallel title of Old New Orleans and a nearly identical design, the publisher announced, albeit retrospectively, that Old New York had provided a template for The Old City Fiction Series, intended eventually to encompass San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. In Wharton’s published correspondence with Rutger B. Jewett, Appleton’s editor-in-chief, there is no mention of The Old City Fiction Series; and she likely remained unaware of it, although ads for Old New York were splashed across the dust jacket flaps of Old New Orleans. If this twin has any claim of kinship to Wharton, however, it is as a decidedly poor relation, a sibling in appearance only. Writing to Jewett on 23 February 1923,1 Wharton mentioned a proposal from Paul Reynolds, editor of McCall’s Magazine, for “six articles on my recollections of New York Society, at $2,500 an article.” McCall’s had evolved from the ladies’ magazines of the 1890s, a lucrative new venue aimed at middle-class readers. The pay Reynolds offered was temptingly generous, but Wharton had reservations. Old New York was “a small affair,” she told Jewett, and she expected to exhaust its literary potential by the time she