Hudson River Bracketed is the first of two novels about Vance Weston, an aspiring writer from the West who visits the Hudson Valley to recover from an illness. While there, he marries one woman, falls in love with another, and becomes an author.
The title of the book is supposedly taken from a type of architecture described by Andrew Jackson Downing, an influential 19th-century architect and landscape designer. But while he talked about houses in the Bracketed Mode and lived and worked in the Hudson Valley, the term is apparently Wharton’s. It’s now used to describe a Gothic style of architecture found along the Hudson River. A fictional house in this style, the Willows, plays an important role in the novel.
Published in November 1929
