A never-before-published short story by Edith Wharton, the first female Pulitzer prize winner, who encapsulated the so-called gilded age of US society in bestselling novels including The Age of Innocence, received a first public airing on Friday.

The Men Who Saved the World, discovered in the author’s archives at Yale University, appears in the Strand, a quarterly magazine that has previously turned up lost or previously unknown works by literary luminaries such as Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene and Tennessee Williams.

The story, believed to have been written no earlier than July 1918, is a significant find for scholars and fans of Wharton’s works. It was spread across two corrected but undated typescripts, found “incomplete and unpublished” in the Edith Wharton Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Set during a dinner party in a French chateau towards the end of the first world war, it tells of the country’s wealthiest residents attempting to move on from the conflict that recently scarred them, even as guns are heard still booming and soldiers dying only miles away.

The tale is punctuated by the meal being served on a grand dining room table that was used as an operating table for amputations only months before when the chateau was used as a field hospital.

A main character is a young American nurse called Milly Arden, who observes the household’s easy return to its privileged prewar days as she wrestles with the horrors of war and the injuries she has seen and treated.

Arden’s character appears to be at least in part autobiographical: Wharton, who died in 1937 aged 75, had extensive experience of field hospitals during the conflict also known as the Great War, and helped set up medical care and facilities for affected women and children. Many of her observations appeared in Fighting France, a series of articles published by Penn State University’s digital archive.

Andrew Gulli, editor-in-chief of the Strand, said the story from more than a century ago has parallels in global events of today.

“We live in a time where we’re very far away from a lot of horrific events that are happening around the world, and this story sort of encapsulates that mood where there’s this beautiful chateau, and people are trying to go back to the old prewar era with the chandeliers and this wonderful dancing, and a dinner party, and not far away the war’s still happening,” he said.

“Wharton is just wonderful with contrast. There’s the table where there were amputations going on, and then it’s serving as a dinner table. And also in a generational way, there’s the older lady trying for business as usual, trying to go back to the prewar era, almost in denial about what is really happening.

“Then you have Milly, the nurse from the younger generation, who has great knowledge of a lot of the suffering, the fear, the horror of the war; and a young soldier, who I wouldn’t say is shell-shocked, but you can feel beneath the surface his great unease, that he’s seen the trauma and the horrors of war as well.”

Gulli said to the best of his knowledge the story has never been published, although it was analyzed by Isabelle Parsons, a British Open University professor, Wharton scholar and author who first uncovered the manuscripts, for Johns Hopkins University’s Edith Wharton Review in 2023.

“In the past decade, news of fresh archival discoveries has frequently thrilled Wharton’s casual and critical readers,” she wrote in the article, referring to the 2017 unearthing in Texas of an unseen 1901 play called The Shadow of Doubt.

The short story, Parsons said, “casts a satirical eye over the volunteer efforts of privileged women. Perhaps most remarkably The Men Who Saved the World reads like an experimental attempt – ultimately abandoned by Wharton – at confronting the traumatic effects of warfare through its explicit references to amputation as medical care at the front.”

Gulli said he hoped the story would appeal to a new generation of Wharton readers.

“It’s always very exciting when something like this turns up,” he said. “Wharton was a very prolific writer. What struck me about this story was there were two corrected manuscripts, and it just felt very timely.

“For people who are interested in Edith Wharton because of The Age of Innocence and some of her short stories and the generation she managed to capture in her works, they’re going to be very excited by this.”

On the street, in a huge line, undeterred by rain, they gathered to pass books.

Bibliophiles, builders from nearby construction sites, kids with their parents, all stood for hundreds of metres along Bourke Street in Melbourne’s CBD on Thursday morning in a human chain.

They were there to help the beloved bookshop, Hill of Content, move from its location of more than 100 years to a new home.

In wintry weather 300 people stood in a line passing thousands of books up Bourke Street, from Hill of Content’s old store into the new.

As rain started falling people pulled out umbrellas and raincoats, with the books wrapped in brown paper.

Hill of Content is the city’s oldest bookstore, opening in 1922 at 86 Bourke Street. The three-storey heritage-listed building it occupied for 103 years was sold for $5.3m last year, with the bookshop’s owners forced to start searching for a new home.

Diana Johnson, who owns Hill of Content with her husband, Duncan Johnson, said the human chain would pass 17,000 books up to the new store.

“There are a fair number of people I know in the line, lots of loyal customers, we are so grateful they have supported us all those years,” she said.

“We couldn’t possibly close the shop down on our watch. It’s been in Melbourne literacy for over 103 years. So we decided we would continue it on.”

Within an hour, the army of booklovers had already put hundreds of books on the new shelves, Johnson said.

She was inspired to try relocating the store’s inventory with a human chain after a customer told her of a “book brigade” in the United States that helped move Serendipity Books in Michigan to a new location.

“I am just so grateful,” Johnson said.

The new premises at 32 Bourke Street are just metres away from the old, and Hill of Content put out a call on social media earlier this month asking booklovers to help it move.

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“Many hands make light work. Join us and see the power of bookish community,” the Instagram post read.

On Thursday, literature lovers turned out in force.

Jess, who was standing in line, described it as “a human conveyor belt”.

She admitted she “didn’t come often” to the old store, but would visit the new one.

A little further up the chain, three young builders had jumped into the line after seeing it happening while on break from work.

“We were just doing the fit-out work on the building, next minute people lining up, so we thought we’d get down,” Wyatt said.

Standing next to them, Angela joked they were getting “book fit” as they stood in line.

“These young men, they don’t really read a lot, I don’t think,” she said. “But we’ve been giving them some recs.”

In line, there was also a lot of discussion about whether it is Hill of Content, as in satisfied, or content, as in production – a debate that has cropped up among the city’s booklovers.

“It’s what you want it to be,” said Johnson, before adding “but it’s actually hill of content”, like the peaceful.

“When Albert Spencer first came down here and set it up in 1922 it was a very, very wild area,” she said.

“So he went up into the gardens and walked around, wondering, what can I call my shop.

“[He called it] the hill of content, where you can come in and you can be contented and get away from all that’s happening outside. It’s been 103 years.”

Something happens to us around the age of five, six or seven, when our sense of ourself contracts, becomes more specific, and we realise that besides being part of a family and a society, there is something in us that belongs to us alone.

This for me happened in Tripoli, by the Libyan Mediterranean Sea. I remember how consoling and eventful living beside it was; how it changed, and how the companionship of its alterations accompanied me. Our city changed. People got married and divorced. But neither births nor deaths altered it. The sea was untouched. Constant in its variety. Decadent in its obliviousness.

Part of the wonder I felt was that the waters I swam in, that filled my ears and mouth and open eyes, were the same waters that touched distant shores, places such as Cyprus and Crete, Barcelona and Sanremo, Gaza and Marseille. Or nearby places, such as Alexandria, which, for my family, held mythical status. It was where my maternal grandmother was born and both sides of my family lived for a time when, after resisting Benito Mussolini’s occupation, they moved to neighbouring Egypt. Such proximities filled me with wonder, but also the practical knowledge that the world existed all at once: that then was now, and there was here, and that all divisions, both of time and space, were, perhaps like all declarations of belonging, approximate.

Books, regardless of their subject, are often motored by a concern with bridging the distances, with disparate situations, with difference, with dissimilar states of being, with characters who stand poles apart, men and women who, in their solitary hours, are running against their own hearts.

“What shall Cordelia do?” Cordelia asks herself in King Lear. And the answer that comes to her comes as quickly and effortlessly as a natural event: “Love, and be silent.” It’s a simple and yet complicated verdict. There is a wellspring of confidence required in order to love and be loved. A confidence that verges on faith. A faith in correspondence, in the simple fact that what we feel most deeply does not need to be uttered. In fact, this sort of faith worries about utterance, is suspicious of it, of the damage that can be caused by spelling it out. And yet, how can we truly know another person, and how might we make ourselves known to them, if words alone are not enough?

Such fear of correspondence, and the need for it too, is literature’s worry. Given that books are made up of words, it is a paradox that one of their abiding concerns is the unsaid and the unsayable. Literature has a passion for silence. It trusts in the vaguest, most subtly made connection. The best stories do this; they bring together seemingly isolated elements and expose the natural affinities between them. This is why one way to define a library is as a collection of surprising bonds, of coincidental attachments, an amalgamation of seemingly disparate points.

That peculiar mixture of excitement and fear, of melancholy and joy, of boredom and wonder, which I felt as a child standing beside the sea, is strangely analogous to the feeling I get on walking into a good library. Both offer the potential of liberal travel, of surprising encounters, of aimlessness and the danger of drowning, the temptation of being lost as well as the fear of being lost. This is why the banning of books, and the silencing or dismissing of certain voices – as happened only recently in Frankfurt, for example, when an award ceremony celebrating the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli was cancelled on the grounds of the author’s nationality – offends in us an essential human need and freedom.

Our age fears books. It is worried about ungovernable expression. It often mistakes the author for the authority on her work, when only the work is the true authority on itself. Anyone who has written an honest line knows this. Added to this is that other, much older fear, which power everywhere has often felt towards books: that they risk disrupting the official narrative, make those whom we have decided are fundamentally different from ourselves vivid, present and equal.

This is why the violence of war, of death, occupation and displacement, is invested in what sort of libraries we end up with. War wants to extend its murderous tentacles into our bookshelves: the public and private ones, the physical and those we carry within us.

In the first half of the 20th century, Albert Camus attempted to lay a claim on his time, to define it: “The 17th century,” he wrote, “was the century of mathematics; the 18th of the physical sciences; the 19th of biology. Our century, the 20th, is the century of fear.”

If we were to attempt to update that statement, we might still call ours, the 21st, the century of fear, but also of fragmentation. Very few of us, even those who have lived where they were born, feel connected to a sense of community. But I also mean fragmentation in the wider sense, from being connected to universalist principles of justice and human rights, for example. To conduct ourselves as though we truly believed that human life, no matter where, was equally precious, and not to tailor our outrage depending on the nationality or race of the victim.

War is horrific for all the reasons that we know it to be, but it is also horrific because it is invested in such corruptions. The opposite of war is not peace – peace is merely its absence; the opposite of war is cooperation. And no work of literature can function without its cooperative parts.

Although neither question is easy to answer, most people ask how a book starts, at which point did you decide to write it. Few ever ask how it ended, how you knew when it was finished. The poet Marianne Moore worried about the second question. How was she to know that she had enough poems for her book? She shared her doubts with her editor, TS Eliot, who was then publisher at Faber. In a letter dated 31 January 1934, Eliot replied: “The point at which one has ‘enough’ for a book (of verse) is not a quantitative matter alone … One only has not enough, when one feels that the poems written require the cooperation of certain poems not yet written, in order to be themselves quite.”

This inner cooperation of the various parts that make up a work of literature – so it can be itself quite – is mirrored large in a library. Which is to say, as well as everything else that a library is, it is also a metaphor for a collaborative society. An excellent library is our most diverse and divergent structure of human knowledge, the most accepting of opposites, the most enthusiastic for the accidental as well as the curated points of contact, the most promiscuously curious and hungry. It seeks to fulfil our appetites, but is also in itself evidence of the breadth of our hope and inquiry.