Edith Wharton and other writers

I have written before about the similarities and differences between Edith Wharton and Jane Austen, so there’s no need to write again. The gist of it is that I love and admire them both for their acute perception and deep understanding of people, their sharp tongue, irony, and wry humour, and for their vividly drawn characters, but they have different styles, approaches, themes, and concerns, which is a good thing. 
If anyone asks, I’d say I prefer Jane Austen, which is to be expected because I discovered her several years ago and have read all her works, including the incomplete works, just not the juvenilia. She’s also the author that I feel closest to my heart (even though Tolstoy’s a greater writer), because of her views on relationships, and her ideas about balance, moderation, self-awareness, and the different virtues. However, that’s my personal taste, I get it if someone else prefers Wharton.    
In terms of psychological insight, I think Wharton is comparable to George Eliot, and both of them are interested in moral choice, except that Wharton’s novels don’t have an intrusive narrator and a moralising tone. Some critics have said Wharton’s very harsh on her female characters, but so is George Eliot on the female characters she disapproves of—just look at her stabs at Celia Brooke and Rosamond Vincy. I can’t help trying to imagine Undine Spragg under George Eliot’s pen. 
The main difference between these 2 writers is that, even though both deal with moral choice, George Eliot’s interested in sympathy (selflessness vs selfishness), kindness/ philanthropy, and human connection, Edith Wharton’s more concerned with dignity and self-respect. George Eliot focuses on the relations between people, Wharton concentrates on the conflict between the individual and society, exploring ideas about freedom vs conventions, human needs/ passions vs social duties, and so on. 
As I have written several times before, George Eliot is a writer I respect immensely but always struggle with. Readers who can get along well with her would probably find her more philosophical, and in a way, larger than Wharton. My aesthetics is heavily influenced by Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Nabokov, so I personally dislike the intrusive narrator, especially when I feel she is spoon-feeding readers something that could be suggested or hinted (here and here). It is easy to see why I prefer and think more highly of Wharton as an artist. 
Now, what about Edith Wharton and Henry James? So far, I have deliberately avoided mentioning James or making any comparison, because I have read lots of articles and essays in which the author writes at length about how James is superior and how Wharton doesn’t do certain things he does. This is something I don’t understand, because if they love James so much, why do they write about Wharton at all?  
I also take issues with it when someone sees her as a lesser James, or [insert adjective] James, because to me, she’s not [anything] James, she’s Edith Wharton. 
Whilst it is true that he’s her mentor, they both write about the American upper class, and they both tell a single story in each novel (instead of several strands of stories as Tolstoy and George Eliot do), they are very different. 
Look at this passage from Edmund Wilson: 

“Her work was then the desperate product of a pressure of maladjustments; and it very soon took a direction totally different from that of Henry James, as a lesser disciple of whom she is sometimes pointlessly listed. James's interests were predominantly esthetic: He is never a passionate social prophet; and only rarely—as in The Ivory Tower, which seems in turn to have derived from Mrs. Wharton—does he satirize plutocratic America. But a passionate social prophet is precisely what Edith Wharton became. At her strongest and most characteristic, she is a brilliant example of the writer who relieves an emotional strain by denouncing his generation.” (full essay) 

(Notice how Wilson has to say she’s a lesser disciple?)
Here is a fairer comparison, from Marilyn French: 

“It is true that they were personally close and perhaps had similar sensibilities, and that they were looking at the same world. But James, a man, emphasized the individual within society; he had a strong sense of legitimacy that strengthened and colored what he created, Wharton was far more aware of the power of the environment over the individual, of the sapping of energy caused by a sense of illegitimacy, and of the impossibility of getting beyond the bodily and social consequences of sex. James’s genius was linguistic and psychological; Wharton’s was sociological and psychological. Without seeming to diminish James—who cannot be diminished—one must separate the two authors and focus on Wharton’s excellences. She has a wider scope; she is more interested in the particular experience of women; and she had a profounder sense of constriction.” (full essay)

Comparison is not necessarily a problem, but critics usually pair Edith Wharton with, and compare her to, Henry James, in order to diminish and denigrate her, which is not only pointless but also foolish, because they’re different. 
Personally I prefer Wharton. It might be too early to say, because I’m reading the 3rd Wharton novel, and from James have only read The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, The Turn of the Screw, and some short works including “Daisy Miller”. However, my impression so far is that I admire James but can’t warm to him. Wharton’s also interested in nuance and subtlety, but she’s more direct, more energetic, and not so vague.  
Her characters are also more vivid. Lately I’ve been thinking about The Portrait of a Lady—a novel I struggled with at the beginning and came to appreciate. I finished it, thinking it’s a great book and particularly admiring the way James writes about silence and things left unsaid. But having finished reading, I find myself rarely thinking about it afterwards (the way I often think about Anna Karenina, Mansfield Park, or Madame Bovary), and a few years later, barely remember anything beyond the general plot. My memory of the book is all muddled up, and all the characters, including Isabel Archer, are very vague to me. It’s not about time, as Anna Karenina or Nastasha Rostova is still vivid to me, for instance, but about the book, as I remember thinking the characters are never not vague, I just came to accept it as I learnt to appreciate the other strengths and qualities of James’s book. Their motives are never clear, but even their character is not very clear. 
The vagueness is the point of The Portrait of a Lady—Isabel Archer is always behind some kind of screen, we never come to understand her or see her clearly, the same way the men in the story never fully understand her. Within the book, it works—we wonder what she would do next, then wonder why she does what she does, but never get a clear answer. The same argument can be made for Washington Square—it’s about the battle of minds, and a lot hinges on other characters predicting Catherine’s actions and guessing her motives.   
But somehow I like Washington Square (my preference is probably a controversial opinion), while The Portrait of a Lady becomes very abstract to me. The vagueness of the characters in The Portrait of a Lady works for the novel and what James was doing, but to me, it seems to work in an abstract sense—the vagueness becomes a hindrance to me appreciating the book in the long run, as I forget the book and can’t see any of the characters.
I don’t expect to forget Lily Bart and Undine Spragg. 
The more I write about Henry James, the clearer it appears to me how different they are. 
I also think Edith Wharton’s more visual. To quote from Marilyn French again: 

“Wharton had an intense visual awareness, especially of nature—a sensitivity she shares with many of her characters. She had an intense visual awareness of interiors as well. […] She was able to conjure an entire way of life with a few concrete details.    
[…] Wharton’s visual apprehension included people as well as things. She noted vividly postures, gestures, manners of speech, manners of walk, the tilt of a head, the way someone held a handkerchief. She paid attention to clothes, but also to the way they were worn. She knew that surfaces reveal values, that the depiction of significant details creates the texture of a life, and that the deepest beliefs of a person or a culture are perceptible in that texture.” 

As a writer, James is more psychological and metaphorical than visual. Wharton doesn’t go as far as Flaubert, but she’s more visual than James, her writing is more sensuous. I have written before about the use of light in The House of Mirth, for instance. This is another reason I prefer Wharton. 
Most importantly, The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and now The Age of Innocence have affected me a lot more strongly than anything I’ve read from James.
Edith Wharton’s not a lesser Henry James. She’s Edith Wharton. And she should be recognised for her own excellences.