Throughout her career Edith Wharton was a prolific writer of short stories and novellas; her first published fiction was a shortstory collection entitled The Greater Inclination (1899) and the last book of new fiction she published before her death was also a collection of tales, The World Over (1936). Her experimentations with the form of the short story and the novella shadowed her work in the writing of full-length fictions; she was able to tease out problems of genre, style, setting, and theme in the shorter fiction, working with the historical, the gothic and ghostly, with manners and with local colour in ways that were of direct use to her in the structuring and management of material in her longer narratives.

Wharton often reflected, in correspondence and in her critical writing, on the characteristics and the utility of the short-story form; it was a genre in which she felt comfortable and confident. In a letter to Robert Grant,written in response to his comments on her novel The Fruit of the Tree, published in 1907, she says:

Wharton not only used the short story as a benchmark against which to judge her success or otherwise with the full-length novel, however. She relished working inventively within the constraints of the short story form whilst also pushing it to its limits in the novella. Including her New England texts: Ethan Frome and Summer, Wharton published eleven novellas, the first being The Touchstone in 1900 and the last the four, issued under the title of Old New York, False Dawn, The Spark, The Old Maid, and New Year's Day, published in 1924.