Edith Wharton is not ordinarily associated with racial issues. But using ideas from feminist literary criticism, Kassanoff finds in Wharton's characters, circumstances, and story lines racial concerns of the comfortable white urban society of the early 1900s. Mixed in with Wharton's wry, sometimes jaundiced, picture of the self-satisfied upper-level white society are "a host of early twentieth-century white patrician anxieties [about race]." This anxiety was not aroused by blacks only. It was broader than garden-variety racial prejudice; and vague and protean, as an anxiety would be. Wharton's characters are uneasy about all foreigners, or immigrants, and the growth in the population of the lower classes. They uneasily sensed their own "race suicide" if they could not come up with a means to preserve their own position. Kassanoff explores the various artful ways explicit, subtle, and ambiguous that Wharton recurringly expresses such anxieties in her works. While concentrating on Wharton's writings, the author occasionally makes references to politicians, social scientists, and the like of the period to illuminate Wharton's sources and motives. Kassanoff sees that in the end Wharton was not despairing nor contemptuous of democratic society, whatever changes it might bring; but became convinced in her long artistic jousting with the racial anxieties of her peers "that in democracy's inclusiveness lay the promise of America's future." The author of this enlightening critique of Wharton that has aspects of a cultural study while being mainly a literary critique is an associate professor of English at Barnard College.

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