"I am afraid," said Winterbourne, "that you will not think Roman fever very pretty.
"I don't care," said Daisy in a little strange tone, "whether I have Roman fever or not!" Upon this the cab driver cracked his whip, and they rolled away over the desultory patches of the antique pavement.
Armed with evolutionary, biology, Saunders takes her readers through House of Mirth and Age of Innocence, as well as the lesser known novels, The Reef, The Old Maid, and The Children, and the short story "
Roman Fever." In Wharton's first best seller, The House of Mirth, the heroine Lily Bart at twenty-nine considers her last chances for marriage and presumably for children.
Realizing finally that Sophia and the children were miserable in that "rancid" city--Wineapple's adjectives can be venturesome--he left England for Italy, where he and Una caught "
Roman fever" (malaria) and nearly died.
He has published two volumes of poetry: The Broken World (U Illinois E 2996) and
Roman Fever (Invisible Cities P, 2001).
Robert Ward, whose distinguished career as an opera composer is highlighted by his version of Arthur Miller's Crucible, set to music the Edith Wharton short story
Roman Fever in 1993.
Writing of
Roman Fever, Bruce Weigl calls Cafagna "a poet of the old way: the singer of songs whose music records and then tells us back the endlessly unfolding story of who we are." Poetry says Cafagna is "the South Bronx of the soul."
Like the James Joyce of Dubliners, Allende builds each of these stories to a moment to epiphany; like the Edith Wharton of
Roman Fever, she poises her characters on the brink of a moment of social change, so that they often seem to be struggling with one foot in the nineteenth century and one in the twentieth.
After The Great Inclination, Wharton continued to write short stories, collecting them regularly in volumes that include Crucial Instances (1901); The Descent of Man (1904), containing some of her most effective early work; The Hermit and the Wild Woman (1908); Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910); <IR> XINGU </IR> (1916); Here and Beyond (1926); Certain People (1930); Human Nature (1933); The World Over (1936), with her masterly "
Roman Fever"; and Ghosts (1937).