Gilded Age Murder: Mariah Fredericks Discusses The Wharton Plot

WRITTEN BY SARAH JOHNSON

In Mariah Fredericks’ The Wharton Plot (Minotaur, 2024), set in 1911 New York City, Edith Wharton delves into the circumstances behind the murder of a fellow writer, David Graham Phillips. The two were not friends. In fact, their first and only meeting, as imagined by Fredericks, demonstrates their mutual un-admiration as Edith’s deliciously satirical wit is activated by Phillips’ pompous attitude and disdain for her books and her gender.

After Phillips is shot outside the Princeton Club, his sister Carolyn claims he was killed to prevent the publication of his latest fiction manuscript, Susan Lenox, which he’d declared was explosively revealing. Although Edith had found Phillips “deeply unpleasant,” she grows concerned about his death, and also curious. As she tells her old friend Walter Berry, “Secrets and stories… what writer would not seek that out?”

“I’m a huge Wharton fan,” Fredericks says, describing how she conceptualized the story. “I write a mystery series set in 1910s New York, so I’m familiar with the significant murders of that era. The Phillips case isn’t as famous as the Stanford White shooting, but it was considered quite tabloid-worthy at the time.

“I read an essay where H. L. Mencken proclaimed Phillips as America’s greatest living writer, dismissing both Edith Wharton and Henry James for the title because they were too effete and insufficiently ‘American.’ Phillips himself railed against plutocracy, especially wealthy women who loved culture, and—gasp—rode in motorcars. So, in my mind the two writers were already at odds. But his novels have themes in common with Wharton’s: the transactional nature of marriage, the lives of women in changing times. When I discovered that Wharton was in New York at a crucial point in her own life within a few months of his murder, I decided it was worth stretching the truth a little to get them in conversation.”

Edith Wharton is a dazzlingly complex figure, and in The Wharton Plot, she faces a major turning point. A member of the privileged class she depicts so adeptly, Edith is forty-nine, disenchanted with her marriage and Manhattan society, and emotionally entangled (it’s complicated) with another man. The experience of re-creating her viewpoint was “daunting,” Fredericks relates.

“I was on a tight deadline when I proposed this book; if I had had more time to think about it, I wouldn’t have dared. ‘Write like Edith Wharton. Sure, no problem!’ Her voice is familiar because I love her work. But it was important to me to not reduce her to a ‘witty, wealthy writer lady with small dog.’ But when I started looking at where she was in her life and career, I found that her experience reflected several things I was thinking about, primarily: what are the hopes and dreams of mid-life?” she says. “I found the elements of her personal crisis—age, fear of irrelevance, dislike of change and desire for change—so moving and resonant.”

Despite being famous in his time for his novels and muckraking journalism, David Graham Phillips and his fate are footnotes today; for maximum suspense, readers may want to avoid googling him in advance. Wharton, of course, has garnered lasting renown. For Fredericks, the difference is easily explained. “Well, Wharton is a genius and Phillips isn’t,” she states. “In Susan Lenox, which has been compared to The House of Mirth, he breaks from the action to discourse at length about society as if he were writing an op ed. I can see how his books felt very now at the time they were written, but he writes with a view of how people ought to behave, and it gets tiresome fast.  But Wharton isn’t so concerned with what should be, so she sees what is with much greater clarity. As a person, she might have strong opinions, but she doesn’t judge her characters… She really shows you the value of emotional curiosity in storytelling.”

Regarding accuracy in fiction, “as a reader of historicals, I prefer when a novelist works with the known facts as much as possible,” says Fredericks. “For The Lindbergh Nanny (Minotaur, 2022), I stayed close to the history … but the murder of David Graham Phillips isn’t much known or debated in our time, so I felt like I could fictionalize a little. Once you have Edith Wharton as your detective, the reader is on notice that we’re no longer in the realm of strict truth. But as far as the personal and career details of her life, I tried to be accurate, with one exception,” she says, one relating to Wharton’s Pekingese, named Choumai.

For Fredericks, who says she loved writing her Gilded Age mysteries about ladies’ maid Jane Prescott, standalone historicals allow her to go deeper into a subject. “You’re not so much exploring a time and place as you are saying something specific about a particular event or individual,” she continues, explaining how the process stretched her skills in an invaluable way. She also notes that “simply from a commercial standpoint, there’s an advantage in a non-fiction hook. Readers who may not know Jane Prescott—or care—will know about the Lindbergh kidnapping or Edith Wharton.”

A highlight in The Wharton Plot is Edith’s tart commentary on the publishing industry, both wittily phrased and relatable. “How little the battles between writers and publishers have changed! Almost all of Wharton’s complaints in the novel, such as ‘Words fail to express how completely I don’t like it,’ are authentic,” says Fredericks. “She criticized the ellipses, wrote Scribner’s, asking, ‘Gentlemen, am I not to receive any copies of my book?’ and insisted that friends hadn’t been able to find her latest anywhere. Like most writers, when a book didn’t sell, she felt it was because the house didn’t support it. But she clearly had great affection for the editors she worked with. One thing that’s different—a royalty rate of 20%. That has certainly changed.”

Fredericks’ descriptions of daily life amid the New York upper crust are especially vivid. Commenting on the setting, “I’m sure that much of the wealthy elite of that time was as dim and mean-spirited as the wealthy elite of today,” she says. “But they had wonderful chroniclers, such as Wharton, Ward McAllister, and countless anonymous reporters that as a group, they continue to fascinate. It’s an era that has all the elements of a good story. The gaudy spending and deranged social battles give you the comedy. The strict societal rules give you the cruelty and dramatic tension. And the obscene wealth gives you the beautiful settings.”

About the contributor: Sarah Johnson is the book review editor for the Historical Novels Review.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 107 (February 2024)