Edith Wharton may have been one of the greatest novelists in American history, but she was also a bit of a Karen. “She was the kind of lady who fired off a high-toned letter of complaint,” Jonathan Franzen once wrote, “to the owner of a shop where a clerk had refused to lend her an umbrella.”

To be clear, Franzen, who shares an excerpt from his novel in progress in this week’s Fiction Issue, is a fan. In 2012, he looked back, with a mix of admiration and incredulity, at Wharton and her three most famous novels, “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country,” and “The Age of Innocence.” Each work, he argued, refracts the advantages and deprivations of Wharton’s own life: the world of ease and prosperity she inhabited and the physical beauty that she never possessed. Wharton’s heroines, like their creator, could be intensely unlikable—shallow, materialistic, social climbing—and yet all ultimately earn the reader’s sympathy, for reasons that Franzen perceptively explains.

With her wealth and status, Wharton could have pursued a simpler path, and worked to develop a persona that made her more palatable in her time and in ours. She chose another route instead. “Despite all her privileges, despite her strenuous socializing, she remained an isolate and a misfit,” Franzen observes, “which is to say, a born writer.”