Unseen Edith Wharton’s short story was published more than a century later Edith Wharton

The previously unpublished short story by Edith Wharton, the first female Pulitzer Prize winner who summed up the so-called golden age of American society in her best-selling novels including The Age of Innocence, made its public debut Friday.

The Men Who Saved the World, discovered in the author’s archives at Yale University, appears in The Strand, a quarterly magazine that has uncovered previously lost or previously unknown works by such literary luminaries as Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and Tennessee Williams.

The story, which is believed to have been written before July 1918, is an important discovery for researchers and fans of Wharton’s work. It was published in two corrected but undated editions, found “unfinished and unpublished” in the Edith Wharton Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Set during a dinner party in a French chateau near the end of World War I, the film tells the story of the country’s wealthiest residents trying to move on from the conflict that has recently scarred them, even as the sounds of guns and soldiers dying can still be heard only miles away.

The tale is punctuated by the meal being served at the large dining room table that had been used as an operating table for amputations just months before the mansion was used as a field hospital.

The main character is a young American nurse named Millie Arden, who watches the family’s easy return to privileged pre-war days as she grapples with the horrors of war and the injuries she has seen and treated.

Arden’s character appears to be at least partly autobiographical: Wharton, who died in 1937 at the age of 75, had extensive experience in field hospitals during the conflict also known as the Great War, and helped establish medical care and facilities for affected women and children. Many of her notes appear in Fighting France, a series of essays published by the Penn State University Digital Archive.

Andrew Jolly, editor of The Strand newspaper, said the story dating back more than a century had parallels with world events today.

“We live in a time that is so far away from a lot of the horrific events that are happening around the world, and this story kind of sums up that mood where there’s this beautiful palace, and people are trying to go back to the old pre-war era with the chandeliers and this wonderful dancing, and the dinner party, and not far away the war is still going on,” he said.

“Wharton is wonderful in contrast. There’s the table where amputations were being performed, and then it’s being used as a dinner table. And also on a generational level, there’s the older lady who’s trying to do business as usual, trying to go back to the pre-war era, almost in denial about what’s really going on.”

“Then you have Millie, the nurse from the younger generation, who has great knowledge of a lot of the suffering and the fear and the horror of war; and a young soldier, I can’t say he was traumatized, but you can feel under the surface his extreme discomfort, because he saw the trauma and the horrors of war as well.”

Jolly said that, as far as he knew, the story had never been published, although it was analyzed by Isabel Parsons, a professor at the British Open University, a Wharton scholar and the author who first uncovered the manuscripts, for Johns Hopkins University’s Edith Wharton Journal in 2023.

“In the past decade, news of new archival discoveries has often excited Wharton’s regular readers and critics,” she wrote in the article, referring to the discovery of an unseen 1901 play in Texas called “Shadow of a Doubt.”

Parsons said the short story “takes a satirical look at the volunteer efforts of remarkable women. Perhaps most notable about The Men Who Saved the World is that it appears to be an experimental attempt—which Wharton eventually abandoned—to confront the traumatic effects of war through its explicit references to amputation as medical care on the front.”

Jolly said he hopes the story will appeal to a new generation of Wharton readers.

“It’s always very exciting when something like this comes up,” he said. “Wharton was a prolific writer. What struck me about this story was that there were two corrected manuscripts, and I felt it was very timely.”

“For people who are interested in Edith Wharton because of The Age of Innocence and some of her short stories and the generation that she was able to portray in her works, they will be very excited about this.”