Janet Beer is Professor and Head of the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She taught previously at Warwick University, Yale University where she held scholarship and the Roehampton Institute London. Her main areas of scholarship are early 20thC literature generally and Edith Wharton studies in particular. She has written introductions to four Wharton texts including The Age of Innocence (1995) as well as two full studies: Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters (1995) and Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction (1997).