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Edith Wharton
The definitive biography of one of America’s greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf.
Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton—tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction.
Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton’s life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair vividly, intimately recounted here.
With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her far to be more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton—tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction.
Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton’s life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair vividly, intimately recounted here.
With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her far to be more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
869 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2007
190 people are currently reading
2754 people want to read
About the author
Hermione Lee
71 books146 followersHermione Lee grew up in London and was educated at Oxford. She began her academic career as a lecturer at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va (Instructor, 1970-1971) and at Liverpool University (Lecturer, 1971-1977). She taught at the University of York from 1977, where over twenty years she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Literature. From 1998-2008 she was the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. In 2008 Lee was elected President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
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March 13, 2022
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May 5, 2009
Although I have almost zero interest in military strategy, I do believe I would read a biography of Vice Admiral Nelson if Hermione Lee wrote one. Her prose is an absolute pleasure, she's insightful and nuanced, and I'm very lucky that she happens to specialize in authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rather than in tire manufacturers or bank directors. Her most recent book, Edith Wharton, only heightens my esteem: she paints a complex, multi-dimensional portrait of Wharton, never glossing over her less attractive features, but never sensationalizing or over-simplifying them either.
Diving into a biography is sometimes daunting, because there are usually many pages before one even reaches the object of one's interest. Many biographers begin far back on the paternal side of the subject's ancestry, working gradually up to her father's meeting with her mother. Then, when the birth of the subject is almost in view, the reader must backtrack into the mists of ancestry on the maternal side, and spend another chunk of time waiting for the subject's mother to meet her father. We then hear all about their courtship, still waiting patiently for the subject to be born. All of this is important information, of course, but the strictly chronological accounts in many biographies don't do much to elucidate why it's important: the ways in which the subject herself interacted with her parents; how her ancestry shaped her; conflicts in her adult life that may have had their seeds in her parents' relationships. Lee takes a more organic approach, incorporating into the accounts of Wharton's upbringing and ancestry glimpses of the woman she would become, and the complicated relationship she would develop with her upper-class "Old New York" parentage. I found that, in addition to being infinitely more enjoyable to read, this method allowed me to get more out of the sections on Wharton's parents than I usually do. Thanks to Lee's early sign-posting of relevant aspects of the parent-child relationship in the Jones household, I was able to absorb, remember, and apply my reading in the early chapters to events much later in the book.
This organic, nuanced approach extends to Lee's treatment of the relationship between art and biography. While the events of a writer's life obviously affect her art, many biographers take an overly simplistic view of the way in which that manifests. Some critics, for example, will reduce the work of a writer who suffered from mental illness into a list of symptoms, completely erasing the writer's own agency in creating her art. Or they will hone in on an artist's political liberalism or conservatism, but fail to examine the nuances of those politics, the tensions and harmonies between the artist and any movements in which he may have taken part. Lee's analysis, by contrast, is patient and complex. This is lucky, because Edith Wharton mined material from her own life in varied and unexpected ways. Characters who display surface details culled from her past in Old New York may share very little with their creator on a deeper level, and in her most autobiographical pieces her "self" is often split between multiple characters in a novel or story. She repeatedly re-worked specific themes - forbidden sexuality, or a person still haunted by obsolete social strictures - which were suggested by her experience and deeply important to her in her own life, but in ways that bear little resemblance to her specific circumstances.
A particularly subtle, and touching, elucidation of the life/art relationship has to do with The Age of Innocence, which Wharton wrote just after the death of her dear friend and fellow-writer, Henry James. The two were close in a deep yet complicated way that allowed for certain resentments on either side. James tended to caricature Wharton to other members of their peer group, and Wharton spent her entire career fighting against a critical reputation as "a female Henry James." Yet the two supported each other more-or-less successfully through dark times. (As a gossipy aside, James was instrumental in introducing Wharton to the one physical passion of her life, Morton Fullerton, and proceeded to form an awkward third to many of their rendezvous and quarrels, much like a character out of one of his own novels). Lee points out that The Age of Innocence was the first book Wharton had written since her very early career that James would not read, and delicately examines the many nods to different James plots and characters that are scattered throughout the novel. Considering Wharton's life-long struggle to divorce her work from James in the public imagination, it's even more poignant that she would engage in this kind of public elegy for her lost friend, in the medium they shared - and, at the same time, as always, she is re-working and commenting on his writing as she honors it.
One of the things I appreciate most about Lee is that she respects the passions of her subjects, even if they may be unexpected from a reader's point of view. As she begins a long section on Wharton's gardens, she reminds us that
As a reader and a human, I find this kind of reminder extremely useful. There exists in every life more than we expect, more than we care about when we begin our examination. Just because we enter into the life of Wharton wanting to read about her books, doesn't mean that we should pass over other passions that sustained her just as much. Lee does a beautiful job of portraying how crucial and soul-sustaining gardening was for Wharton, how she strove toward her gardening vision, exulted in her successes, and mourned deeply when her entire garden was killed by a freak storm and cold snap as she approached old age. Gardens may not be that important to me, but through Lee's eloquence I grasped their deep and lasting importance for Wharton, and connected that importance to similarly life-giving elements of my own life.
But as lovely as the gardening section is, my favorite pages deal with Wharton's 4,000-volume library, beautifully bound, much read and marked up. Only a careful and passionate reader like Lee could communicate the excitement and joy of connecting with Wharton through the record she left of a life of reading:
I love this idea of books, marked-up and idiosyncratically organized, as somewhere between a record of one's life and a room of one's friends. It's how I feel about my own library, and a source of joy to me every day. Occurring, as it does, toward the end of the biography, this section on Wharton's library is a chance for the reader to look back over the course of her long life from a different perspective, and to access her feelings in a different, and possibly more intimate, way.
There's no avoiding it, Edith Wharton is long: 762 pages in paperback, discounting the copious notes section. It's a commitment, and there are quirks that strike the modern reader as odd: Lee's decision, for example, not to translate most of her French quotations. (I personally quite liked this, since I read French middling-well and prefer not to read the same passage twice, but I can understand how it might get frustrating for the majority of English readers.) But to me, every page of this tome was worthwhile. I now feel I know someone new: a driven, passionate, flawed individual, one I appreciate and disagree with, one who would probably not like or humor me if we had dinner together, but one who seems tangibly present thanks to this biography. My own copy of Edith Wharton is just as marked-up as Wharton's volumes of Keats or Proust, and will be a good friend to me from now on.
Diving into a biography is sometimes daunting, because there are usually many pages before one even reaches the object of one's interest. Many biographers begin far back on the paternal side of the subject's ancestry, working gradually up to her father's meeting with her mother. Then, when the birth of the subject is almost in view, the reader must backtrack into the mists of ancestry on the maternal side, and spend another chunk of time waiting for the subject's mother to meet her father. We then hear all about their courtship, still waiting patiently for the subject to be born. All of this is important information, of course, but the strictly chronological accounts in many biographies don't do much to elucidate why it's important: the ways in which the subject herself interacted with her parents; how her ancestry shaped her; conflicts in her adult life that may have had their seeds in her parents' relationships. Lee takes a more organic approach, incorporating into the accounts of Wharton's upbringing and ancestry glimpses of the woman she would become, and the complicated relationship she would develop with her upper-class "Old New York" parentage. I found that, in addition to being infinitely more enjoyable to read, this method allowed me to get more out of the sections on Wharton's parents than I usually do. Thanks to Lee's early sign-posting of relevant aspects of the parent-child relationship in the Jones household, I was able to absorb, remember, and apply my reading in the early chapters to events much later in the book.
This organic, nuanced approach extends to Lee's treatment of the relationship between art and biography. While the events of a writer's life obviously affect her art, many biographers take an overly simplistic view of the way in which that manifests. Some critics, for example, will reduce the work of a writer who suffered from mental illness into a list of symptoms, completely erasing the writer's own agency in creating her art. Or they will hone in on an artist's political liberalism or conservatism, but fail to examine the nuances of those politics, the tensions and harmonies between the artist and any movements in which he may have taken part. Lee's analysis, by contrast, is patient and complex. This is lucky, because Edith Wharton mined material from her own life in varied and unexpected ways. Characters who display surface details culled from her past in Old New York may share very little with their creator on a deeper level, and in her most autobiographical pieces her "self" is often split between multiple characters in a novel or story. She repeatedly re-worked specific themes - forbidden sexuality, or a person still haunted by obsolete social strictures - which were suggested by her experience and deeply important to her in her own life, but in ways that bear little resemblance to her specific circumstances.
A particularly subtle, and touching, elucidation of the life/art relationship has to do with The Age of Innocence, which Wharton wrote just after the death of her dear friend and fellow-writer, Henry James. The two were close in a deep yet complicated way that allowed for certain resentments on either side. James tended to caricature Wharton to other members of their peer group, and Wharton spent her entire career fighting against a critical reputation as "a female Henry James." Yet the two supported each other more-or-less successfully through dark times. (As a gossipy aside, James was instrumental in introducing Wharton to the one physical passion of her life, Morton Fullerton, and proceeded to form an awkward third to many of their rendezvous and quarrels, much like a character out of one of his own novels). Lee points out that The Age of Innocence was the first book Wharton had written since her very early career that James would not read, and delicately examines the many nods to different James plots and characters that are scattered throughout the novel. Considering Wharton's life-long struggle to divorce her work from James in the public imagination, it's even more poignant that she would engage in this kind of public elegy for her lost friend, in the medium they shared - and, at the same time, as always, she is re-working and commenting on his writing as she honors it.
One of the things I appreciate most about Lee is that she respects the passions of her subjects, even if they may be unexpected from a reader's point of view. As she begins a long section on Wharton's gardens, she reminds us that
This expensive, pleasurable, and profound obsession should not be thought of by non-gardeners as a form of quietism or a mere hobby. ... Apart from traveling, writing, reading, and seeing her friends, this, for the rest of her life, was what she did. ... She was a writer and gardener, and her gardens became, for those who saw them and heard about them, as admired as her books.
As a reader and a human, I find this kind of reminder extremely useful. There exists in every life more than we expect, more than we care about when we begin our examination. Just because we enter into the life of Wharton wanting to read about her books, doesn't mean that we should pass over other passions that sustained her just as much. Lee does a beautiful job of portraying how crucial and soul-sustaining gardening was for Wharton, how she strove toward her gardening vision, exulted in her successes, and mourned deeply when her entire garden was killed by a freak storm and cold snap as she approached old age. Gardens may not be that important to me, but through Lee's eloquence I grasped their deep and lasting importance for Wharton, and connected that importance to similarly life-giving elements of my own life.
But as lovely as the gardening section is, my favorite pages deal with Wharton's 4,000-volume library, beautifully bound, much read and marked up. Only a careful and passionate reader like Lee could communicate the excitement and joy of connecting with Wharton through the record she left of a life of reading:
These marginal marks make up a form of autobiography. There are love gifts from Fullerton and copies of his work; affectionate dedications from James; copies of Berry's books; books she could not discuss with Teddy, or that were left over from his own minimal collection; books that once belonged to her father, her mother or her brothers; early gifts from a great variety of French writers, presentation copies from Theodore Roosevelt. There are old book-plates from Land's End, and the ownership signatures of "Edith Jones." There are corrections she made in her copies of her own works. Her books do not just provide evidence for her life story, they were also protagonists in it, and the equivalent of old friends.
I love this idea of books, marked-up and idiosyncratically organized, as somewhere between a record of one's life and a room of one's friends. It's how I feel about my own library, and a source of joy to me every day. Occurring, as it does, toward the end of the biography, this section on Wharton's library is a chance for the reader to look back over the course of her long life from a different perspective, and to access her feelings in a different, and possibly more intimate, way.
There's no avoiding it, Edith Wharton is long: 762 pages in paperback, discounting the copious notes section. It's a commitment, and there are quirks that strike the modern reader as odd: Lee's decision, for example, not to translate most of her French quotations. (I personally quite liked this, since I read French middling-well and prefer not to read the same passage twice, but I can understand how it might get frustrating for the majority of English readers.) But to me, every page of this tome was worthwhile. I now feel I know someone new: a driven, passionate, flawed individual, one I appreciate and disagree with, one who would probably not like or humor me if we had dinner together, but one who seems tangibly present thanks to this biography. My own copy of Edith Wharton is just as marked-up as Wharton's volumes of Keats or Proust, and will be a good friend to me from now on.
October 6, 2010
I first attempted to read this biography when it came out. It was during winter break of my first year of grad school, and I was reading anything I could find about Edith Wharton. I thought this biography seemed unparalleled in its breadth and quality. Turner Classic Movies forced me to rethink my initial reaction.
A few days after Christmas in 2007, when I was first reading it, I saw a commercial on TCM claiming they were to air the 1934 production of "The Age of Innocence." Having only seen the masterful Scorsese production and being an ardent admirer of classic film, I was intrigued. The movie was to air at 5 o'clock in the morning. Despite this early time, I told myself, "If it's Wharton-related, waking before dawn is not an issue."
So, at 5am the next day, I struggled to emerge from my cozy bed--eyes encircled with the blackness left from a severe lack of sleep. I stumbled to my television, turned it on, and sat merrily awaiting this classic production. Merrily, up to a point.
The film was so horrible I could barely watch it. I found myself shouting "No!" at the television continuously. The treatment of the yellow roses sequence was ridiculously melodramatic at best. When the credits appeared and Robert Osborne struggled to explain to his audience the importance of this film, I felt betrayed. Angry at the lousy quality of the production and the fact that I awoke at 5am to watch this film, I threw my pillow at the television. As I stood stomping my feet in my bedroom, furious I lost so much sleep over the HOLIDAYS for a poor film, I realized the movie came out in 1934; Wharton died in 1937. I thought, "Ah! I wonder what Edith Wharton thought of this abomination! Such a great wit and stealthy commentator, surely she had some cleverly scathing review!" I rushed to my newly purchased biography, Edith Wharton to look up her thoughts.
Well, I was only let down again--this time by Hermione Lee. According to Lee, this film was never made! Discussing the silent film version, Lee writes,
"There was talk in 1933 of another film version, possibly starring, Wharton was told, someone called Katherine Hepburn, whom she had heard was 'a Hartford lady and a fine actress.' But this came to nothing, and The Age of Innocence had to wait until 1993 for Martin Scorsese" (594).
Yes, you read it. She said it "came to nothing." I believe this is when I quit reading the biography.
A few days after Christmas in 2007, when I was first reading it, I saw a commercial on TCM claiming they were to air the 1934 production of "The Age of Innocence." Having only seen the masterful Scorsese production and being an ardent admirer of classic film, I was intrigued. The movie was to air at 5 o'clock in the morning. Despite this early time, I told myself, "If it's Wharton-related, waking before dawn is not an issue."
So, at 5am the next day, I struggled to emerge from my cozy bed--eyes encircled with the blackness left from a severe lack of sleep. I stumbled to my television, turned it on, and sat merrily awaiting this classic production. Merrily, up to a point.
The film was so horrible I could barely watch it. I found myself shouting "No!" at the television continuously. The treatment of the yellow roses sequence was ridiculously melodramatic at best. When the credits appeared and Robert Osborne struggled to explain to his audience the importance of this film, I felt betrayed. Angry at the lousy quality of the production and the fact that I awoke at 5am to watch this film, I threw my pillow at the television. As I stood stomping my feet in my bedroom, furious I lost so much sleep over the HOLIDAYS for a poor film, I realized the movie came out in 1934; Wharton died in 1937. I thought, "Ah! I wonder what Edith Wharton thought of this abomination! Such a great wit and stealthy commentator, surely she had some cleverly scathing review!" I rushed to my newly purchased biography, Edith Wharton to look up her thoughts.
Well, I was only let down again--this time by Hermione Lee. According to Lee, this film was never made! Discussing the silent film version, Lee writes,
"There was talk in 1933 of another film version, possibly starring, Wharton was told, someone called Katherine Hepburn, whom she had heard was 'a Hartford lady and a fine actress.' But this came to nothing, and The Age of Innocence had to wait until 1993 for Martin Scorsese" (594).
Yes, you read it. She said it "came to nothing." I believe this is when I quit reading the biography.
October 29, 2012
I've become such a fan of Wharton's works in recent years that I picked up this incredibly comprehensive, exhaustively researched, and extremely well written biography.
While I onlyl read about half-way into the book's nearly 800 pages, I enjoyed what I learned about Wharton and her development as a writer. She had a brilliant mind: she was completely self-educated, reading in her father's library, but never having had any formal schooling. Still,her works ended up including some of the most outstanding fiction in American history, as well as non-fiction, poems and plays (which were less successful). She lived much of her life in Europe, sharing with her friend Henry James a complicated national identity: not quite feeling fully American, and more at home in England, France or Italy.
Her professional life succeeded in ways her private life did not. Unhappily married for many years to a man who was not only not her intellectual equal but who was many years her senior and seemed a bad-tempered, melancholy fellow.
I enjoyed reading about her friendship with Henry James, whom she met when she was a rising star and he was already critically acclaimed but never satisfied with his work. Wharton also added to her considerable wealth through her commercial success; her friend James never came close to her degree of success.
I loved this famous anecdote about the two of them from 1907, told by their mutual friend Percy Lubbock:
"She mentioned once that the car in which they were riding had been bought with the proceeds of her last novel. 'With the proceeds of my last novel,' said Henry James meditatively, 'I purchased a small go-cart, or hand-barrow, on which my guests' luggage is wheeled from the station to my house. It needs a coat of paint. With the proceeds of my next novel I shall have it painted.'"
Wharton eventually had an affair with a handsome but unreliable man who broke many hearts -- both female and male. It explains why the themes of infidelity, divorce, and repressed sexuality permeate so much of Wharton's works.
I may pick this up again at a later date and read further about Wharton's heroic relief efforts in France during World War I; a stark contrast to the life of luxury she had been born into and which only grew in degree from her huge professional success.
While I onlyl read about half-way into the book's nearly 800 pages, I enjoyed what I learned about Wharton and her development as a writer. She had a brilliant mind: she was completely self-educated, reading in her father's library, but never having had any formal schooling. Still,her works ended up including some of the most outstanding fiction in American history, as well as non-fiction, poems and plays (which were less successful). She lived much of her life in Europe, sharing with her friend Henry James a complicated national identity: not quite feeling fully American, and more at home in England, France or Italy.
Her professional life succeeded in ways her private life did not. Unhappily married for many years to a man who was not only not her intellectual equal but who was many years her senior and seemed a bad-tempered, melancholy fellow.
I enjoyed reading about her friendship with Henry James, whom she met when she was a rising star and he was already critically acclaimed but never satisfied with his work. Wharton also added to her considerable wealth through her commercial success; her friend James never came close to her degree of success.
I loved this famous anecdote about the two of them from 1907, told by their mutual friend Percy Lubbock:
"She mentioned once that the car in which they were riding had been bought with the proceeds of her last novel. 'With the proceeds of my last novel,' said Henry James meditatively, 'I purchased a small go-cart, or hand-barrow, on which my guests' luggage is wheeled from the station to my house. It needs a coat of paint. With the proceeds of my next novel I shall have it painted.'"
Wharton eventually had an affair with a handsome but unreliable man who broke many hearts -- both female and male. It explains why the themes of infidelity, divorce, and repressed sexuality permeate so much of Wharton's works.
I may pick this up again at a later date and read further about Wharton's heroic relief efforts in France during World War I; a stark contrast to the life of luxury she had been born into and which only grew in degree from her huge professional success.
November 23, 2012
Edith Wharton is in my "big three" favorite authors (the other two being W. Somerset Maugham and Thomas Hardy). My daughter's middle name is Edith, mainly because of my love of Edith Wharton's books. If you have never read one of her books, I suggest you go pick up a copy of Custom of the Country (Wharton's favorite of her books, and maybe mine as well, though I've read it only once, when I've read others twice).
So to say this well-reviewed and respected biography was both a disappointment and a slog is a true sadness. It started off fine, if dull. I always read it with internet access at hand, and I had fun, at first, running to Google or Wikipedia to get some more information on what I was reading--how do you wear a foulard? what does that painting look like? is there a picture of the Egyptian-style waterworks in early Manhattan?--or to translate something from the French. But after the 100th such French passage, and especially after the one Hermione Lee includes to show us that Wharton, writing in French, is just as skilled as she is in English, I could have given a shit. I'm not Gwyneth Paltrow, you know; my three years of high school French twenty-five years ago have not equipped me to just casually read a sentence or a paragraph and be able to pick out much more than a "je" or a "dans." If this was written for accessibility, it fails, and if it was written for the Wharton scholar, it would probably be redundant. I have a system I call "Commitment to Reading," in which I take the total number pages in a book and divide by the chapters, then commit to reading x number of chapters per day until I finish (reading until I catch up any day I lag behind). When I started this, I was on target to finish by November 5th. I got bogged down at chapter 10 on October 26th, and it took me until today, November 22nd, to finish.
The format is roughly chronological, but each chapter also picks up on a theme, such as Wharton's friendship with Henry James; her WWI work; her troubled marriage to mentally ill husband Teddy; or her famed Massachusetts mansion, The Mount. This makes for a choppy pace, as each themed chapter jumps around to fully illustrate the theme. Thus, in the James chapter, we go from their first meeting to his death, then, several hundred pages later, during WWI, he dies "again." If Lee feared a traditional "this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened" biographical history would be too dull, she need only to look to Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, as detailed and well-researched--and chronological--a biography as I've ever read, and also about the best, as a counter to what is presented here. So much of the book was taken up with name dropping of Wharton's friends and acquaintances that the main subject herself, while I learned much about her I didn't know, takes a bit of a back seat to her relationships, if that makes sense. The only time this book really came to life for me was when Lee would stop to summarize and critique Wharton's works, most of which I've read. Only then would I light up and read faster. Worst of all? This 762-page book (plus an additional one hundred and some odd pages of end notes and index) lacks a complete listing of Wharton's works. I made a list of titles I lacked as I ran across them, but you'd think after wading through all this I could have been rewarded with at least that.
So to say this well-reviewed and respected biography was both a disappointment and a slog is a true sadness. It started off fine, if dull. I always read it with internet access at hand, and I had fun, at first, running to Google or Wikipedia to get some more information on what I was reading--how do you wear a foulard? what does that painting look like? is there a picture of the Egyptian-style waterworks in early Manhattan?--or to translate something from the French. But after the 100th such French passage, and especially after the one Hermione Lee includes to show us that Wharton, writing in French, is just as skilled as she is in English, I could have given a shit. I'm not Gwyneth Paltrow, you know; my three years of high school French twenty-five years ago have not equipped me to just casually read a sentence or a paragraph and be able to pick out much more than a "je" or a "dans." If this was written for accessibility, it fails, and if it was written for the Wharton scholar, it would probably be redundant. I have a system I call "Commitment to Reading," in which I take the total number pages in a book and divide by the chapters, then commit to reading x number of chapters per day until I finish (reading until I catch up any day I lag behind). When I started this, I was on target to finish by November 5th. I got bogged down at chapter 10 on October 26th, and it took me until today, November 22nd, to finish.
The format is roughly chronological, but each chapter also picks up on a theme, such as Wharton's friendship with Henry James; her WWI work; her troubled marriage to mentally ill husband Teddy; or her famed Massachusetts mansion, The Mount. This makes for a choppy pace, as each themed chapter jumps around to fully illustrate the theme. Thus, in the James chapter, we go from their first meeting to his death, then, several hundred pages later, during WWI, he dies "again." If Lee feared a traditional "this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened" biographical history would be too dull, she need only to look to Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, as detailed and well-researched--and chronological--a biography as I've ever read, and also about the best, as a counter to what is presented here. So much of the book was taken up with name dropping of Wharton's friends and acquaintances that the main subject herself, while I learned much about her I didn't know, takes a bit of a back seat to her relationships, if that makes sense. The only time this book really came to life for me was when Lee would stop to summarize and critique Wharton's works, most of which I've read. Only then would I light up and read faster. Worst of all? This 762-page book (plus an additional one hundred and some odd pages of end notes and index) lacks a complete listing of Wharton's works. I made a list of titles I lacked as I ran across them, but you'd think after wading through all this I could have been rewarded with at least that.
Read
September 21, 2013I just can't give Edith and Hermione two stars but MY GOD, that was a long slog.
May 29, 2017
An odd book. Please note that the author tells every major novel's storyline, and that of many of the short stories, as though the reader is already familiar with them. In other words, this book is full of spoilers for anyone who still hopes to read some of Mrs. Wharton's fiction for the first time.
A lot of work and research and time went into this book; mine is not a 1-star rating because the book was a cruddy effort. It seemed odd because Hermione Lee is writing something other than a biography here. She several times refers to Edith Wharton's "biographers" and the context makes clear she does not include herself in that category. She never says "other" biographers, for example. She believes she is in some other category.... so this looks like a biography, and for long stretches reads like a biography.... but the author is in some other relationship with her subject.
Or imagines she is. And this explains -- and is further illustrated by -- her strange note at the end of the book, in which she visits Mrs. Wharton's grave outside Paris, finds it neglected, and places on it an artificial flower she buys nearby. And tells us about that, even guessing what Mrs. Wharton's opinion of her deed might be, as the concluding paragraphs of her 762 pages of text.
So which of these two women is this really about?
Hence the 1-star rating. If you can't trust the skipper's hand on the tiller, you can't make the trip. I made the trip, but it was an odd one; and having read the other two major Wharton biographies just before I read this one, I could recall a lot of particulars that got differing treatments. I felt Ms. Lee too often reduced Mrs. Wharton to stereotypes of her personality traits, sometimes in typical "politically correct" vocabulary. She also engaged in "presentism" too often, judging Edith's behavior by the conventions of today. I lost confidence in the author's judgments.
Her book did cause me to upgrade my rating for the R.W.B. Lewis biography of 1975 to three stars. His is the traditional biographer's practice of withholding judgment unless the evidence is overwhelming, or at least very strong. He treats his subject fairly, and thoroughly, although he does seem to lose patience with her in the latter stages of the book -- possibly from the length of time he spent on it, possibly owing to the high-toned histrionics Mrs. Wharton sometimes tended toward in personal matters. Of the three major biographies, I felt that Eleanor Dwight's Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life was the most satisfying.
Edith Wharton was an amazing woman who achieved a great deal in several areas of endeavor. She may have done so partly due to the characteristics that also required her to pay a high price in her personal life, which was stunted despite all her money, fame, and achievement. I enjoy her best writing tremendously, and I read all of it with enthusiasm; her greatness usually shows even in the lesser things. Her life was remarkable but of course it is her fiction with which any reader should first be concerned.
Reading The House of Mirth, The Reef, and The Age of Innocence tells us the most about Edith Wharton as well as about the romantic worlds of mid- to upper-class societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the ways in which she went about writing The Age of Innocence, for example, are also interesting, after the fact; and that is when these biographies come in handy.
Ms. Lee thinks The Custom of the Country is Mrs. Wharton's greatest novel. It is certainly her most satirical. That she treats this aesthetic judgment as a given fact about her subject was one of the things that gave me pause, as the novelist's targets were a little easy, I thought; but it won't hurt anybody to read that novel, either.
A lot of work and research and time went into this book; mine is not a 1-star rating because the book was a cruddy effort. It seemed odd because Hermione Lee is writing something other than a biography here. She several times refers to Edith Wharton's "biographers" and the context makes clear she does not include herself in that category. She never says "other" biographers, for example. She believes she is in some other category.... so this looks like a biography, and for long stretches reads like a biography.... but the author is in some other relationship with her subject.
Or imagines she is. And this explains -- and is further illustrated by -- her strange note at the end of the book, in which she visits Mrs. Wharton's grave outside Paris, finds it neglected, and places on it an artificial flower she buys nearby. And tells us about that, even guessing what Mrs. Wharton's opinion of her deed might be, as the concluding paragraphs of her 762 pages of text.
So which of these two women is this really about?
Hence the 1-star rating. If you can't trust the skipper's hand on the tiller, you can't make the trip. I made the trip, but it was an odd one; and having read the other two major Wharton biographies just before I read this one, I could recall a lot of particulars that got differing treatments. I felt Ms. Lee too often reduced Mrs. Wharton to stereotypes of her personality traits, sometimes in typical "politically correct" vocabulary. She also engaged in "presentism" too often, judging Edith's behavior by the conventions of today. I lost confidence in the author's judgments.
Her book did cause me to upgrade my rating for the R.W.B. Lewis biography of 1975 to three stars. His is the traditional biographer's practice of withholding judgment unless the evidence is overwhelming, or at least very strong. He treats his subject fairly, and thoroughly, although he does seem to lose patience with her in the latter stages of the book -- possibly from the length of time he spent on it, possibly owing to the high-toned histrionics Mrs. Wharton sometimes tended toward in personal matters. Of the three major biographies, I felt that Eleanor Dwight's Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life was the most satisfying.
Edith Wharton was an amazing woman who achieved a great deal in several areas of endeavor. She may have done so partly due to the characteristics that also required her to pay a high price in her personal life, which was stunted despite all her money, fame, and achievement. I enjoy her best writing tremendously, and I read all of it with enthusiasm; her greatness usually shows even in the lesser things. Her life was remarkable but of course it is her fiction with which any reader should first be concerned.
Reading The House of Mirth, The Reef, and The Age of Innocence tells us the most about Edith Wharton as well as about the romantic worlds of mid- to upper-class societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the ways in which she went about writing The Age of Innocence, for example, are also interesting, after the fact; and that is when these biographies come in handy.
Ms. Lee thinks The Custom of the Country is Mrs. Wharton's greatest novel. It is certainly her most satirical. That she treats this aesthetic judgment as a given fact about her subject was one of the things that gave me pause, as the novelist's targets were a little easy, I thought; but it won't hurt anybody to read that novel, either.
July 4, 2011
In short, Lee's biography is more than just a book about the famous author Edith Wharton. In this densely written book, we learn about the culture of turn of the century, upper-class society in New York City. We learn about gardens and landscaping in the United States in comparison to Italy and other European countries. We learn about little lap dogs, and their popularity way before the likes of Paris Hilton started toting them around. We learn of the ever sophisticated, cultural center that was Paris, as the escape for artists in all walks of life. We learn that writing reflects the pain of one's life so directly, that the mental anguish or non-disclosure of such pain can eek out into the words on the page whether the writer want them to or not. For Edith Wharton, the complexities of her life were shown in all of these lessons and a million more.
I can't really, adequately review a book of this nature without directing more of my thoughts around how the book was written. In a pretty weighty, yet engaging academic voice, Hermione Lee takes a linear approach to Edith Wharton's life, in a very non-linear way. Although she starts with her early childhood and marriage, she also bounces around to show how things that occurred in her life are reflected and influence events later on. This moving backward and forward through Wharton's life leaves the chapters in the biography feeling more like individual academic essays that could be lifted from the book for research. I would think that unless you are really, really interested in Wharton's life, that I would only pick up this hefty book for individual research or curiosity. This is not easy reading, by any means, but it is richly satisfying and made me appreciate the artist's life much more. For college students or academics, Lee's book would be a brilliant resource that I can heartily recommend. Give yourself plenty of time to peruse, because you'll need it!
I can't really, adequately review a book of this nature without directing more of my thoughts around how the book was written. In a pretty weighty, yet engaging academic voice, Hermione Lee takes a linear approach to Edith Wharton's life, in a very non-linear way. Although she starts with her early childhood and marriage, she also bounces around to show how things that occurred in her life are reflected and influence events later on. This moving backward and forward through Wharton's life leaves the chapters in the biography feeling more like individual academic essays that could be lifted from the book for research. I would think that unless you are really, really interested in Wharton's life, that I would only pick up this hefty book for individual research or curiosity. This is not easy reading, by any means, but it is richly satisfying and made me appreciate the artist's life much more. For college students or academics, Lee's book would be a brilliant resource that I can heartily recommend. Give yourself plenty of time to peruse, because you'll need it!
June 3, 2014
I know that some readers grouse about Lee's description of Wharton's love of gardening and architecture, but what the hell, this was part-and-parcel of Edith Wharton's life, and was reflected throughout her short stories and novels. I think Hermione Lee has done a magnificent job of capturing the human and literary essence of this most wonderful woman--Edith Neubold Jones Wharton. Edith Wharton is my favorite American author, in the same vein as Thomas Hardy is my favorite British author, and Emile Zola my favorite French author--it is all about 'Naturalism'.
Personally, this biography resonated enormously with me--chapter by chapter--simply because I have read nearly all of her novels, and probably ninety-five percent of her short stories. I now know that this is my go-to reference for all things Wharton going forward. If you like the fiction of Edith Wharton, you owe it to yourself to find a copy of Hermione Lee's biography of her. Sit down with a cuppa tea and enjoy the flowers and the life of a very grande dame!
Personally, this biography resonated enormously with me--chapter by chapter--simply because I have read nearly all of her novels, and probably ninety-five percent of her short stories. I now know that this is my go-to reference for all things Wharton going forward. If you like the fiction of Edith Wharton, you owe it to yourself to find a copy of Hermione Lee's biography of her. Sit down with a cuppa tea and enjoy the flowers and the life of a very grande dame!
August 3, 2008
Hermione Lee wishes she were Edith Wharton. But, she's not.
Where Ms. Wharton illuminates a whole world, she never presumes a frame of reference and is sure to lead us through each nuance of her geography with a carefully drawn map of perfectly chosen words and descriptions. Ms. Lee drops us in the middle of her city in the middle of the block, and it is only by diligence that we can see the signs or street names: She launches into German or French, offering no translation; names people in Edith Wharton's life but gives us little historical understanding of their significance, neither personal nor social; launches into presumptions about the emotional genesis of Wharton's literary works, but does not explain how
she arrives there.
This Biography is full of interesting facts, and rich detail, but its downfall is its snobbery and classism, academic and social.
Isn't that what Ms. Wharton spent her career shooting down?
May I suggest you read Ms. Wharton's autobiography, A BACKWARD GLANCE first. Suddenly, Ms. Lee's presumptions have precedence, and make some sense. Personally, I think a biography should stand on its own.
Where Ms. Wharton illuminates a whole world, she never presumes a frame of reference and is sure to lead us through each nuance of her geography with a carefully drawn map of perfectly chosen words and descriptions. Ms. Lee drops us in the middle of her city in the middle of the block, and it is only by diligence that we can see the signs or street names: She launches into German or French, offering no translation; names people in Edith Wharton's life but gives us little historical understanding of their significance, neither personal nor social; launches into presumptions about the emotional genesis of Wharton's literary works, but does not explain how
she arrives there.
This Biography is full of interesting facts, and rich detail, but its downfall is its snobbery and classism, academic and social.
Isn't that what Ms. Wharton spent her career shooting down?
May I suggest you read Ms. Wharton's autobiography, A BACKWARD GLANCE first. Suddenly, Ms. Lee's presumptions have precedence, and make some sense. Personally, I think a biography should stand on its own.
January 22, 2020
First-rate biography. Very comparable indeed to her biography of Virginia Woolf.
May 20, 2017
I have long loved biographies, but I haven't dug into a massive literary biography of this depth before now. Filled with details fascinating - her love for her dogs, her travels, her control over her friends, her single love affair some twenty years into her disappointing marriage, her work in WWI, her bigotry and anti-Semitism - and excruciatingly dull - her gardening, and her interior decorating ideas - this is on the whole a wonderful examination of a major writer's life. And, at the same time, it's chock full of critical insights into her work, much of which I admit to never having seen, let alone read. Wharton was a complex figure, and a writer of equally complex ideas. I want to read more of her own work, and will one of these days, but I'm glad for now to have made her biographical acquaintance.
February 26, 2014
This book is more suited for a Wharton scholar than for the average reader. I read about a third of the book. There are far too many references to specific Italian gardens, specific individuals whom Wharton knew, etc. to make this book very intelligible to me. This is not a biography for any but an expert to enjoy in my opinion. Far better to read Wharton's books on Italian gardens and the like than to read Ms. Lee's impressions of Wharton's research on Italian gardens. And no pictures of the gardens or foreign landscapes to help the uninitiated understand the context of the book (although she does talk about the adequacy of the illustrations in each of Wharton's books, and Wharton's opinions on the same). Ugh!
Update: I actually finished this book! Why? I don't really know. Maybe I have a strange sense of humor.
The writing is generally good, although the detail is stultifying. Hermione Lee seems to take issue with past biographers' conclusion that Wharton was a rich society lady convinced that she had better taste than anyone else; however, virtually every sentence in this book reinforces that impression. In the case of any hypothetical conflict between the powerful and the less powerful, Wharton will be on the side of the powerful, with the possible exception of an ugly divorce case. Additionally, I find Lee's attitude towards mental illness to be somewhat mystifying. This book did make me want to read Wharton's ghost stories and longer fiction, although I reserve the right to change my mind.
Funny examples from the book:
Towards the end of this enormous tome, Lee quotes Wharton opining that people who don't like money must not know how to spend it well. Yet Wharton evidently spent hers on items such as bejeweled dog collars.
In her lengthy (surprise!) chapter on Wharton's World War I charity work, Lee quotes some of Wharton's business letters, and notes with seeming sorrow that it is a shame Wharton wasn't writing more beautiful sentences. Fatuous and foolish.
Update: I actually finished this book! Why? I don't really know. Maybe I have a strange sense of humor.
The writing is generally good, although the detail is stultifying. Hermione Lee seems to take issue with past biographers' conclusion that Wharton was a rich society lady convinced that she had better taste than anyone else; however, virtually every sentence in this book reinforces that impression. In the case of any hypothetical conflict between the powerful and the less powerful, Wharton will be on the side of the powerful, with the possible exception of an ugly divorce case. Additionally, I find Lee's attitude towards mental illness to be somewhat mystifying. This book did make me want to read Wharton's ghost stories and longer fiction, although I reserve the right to change my mind.
Funny examples from the book:
Towards the end of this enormous tome, Lee quotes Wharton opining that people who don't like money must not know how to spend it well. Yet Wharton evidently spent hers on items such as bejeweled dog collars.
In her lengthy (surprise!) chapter on Wharton's World War I charity work, Lee quotes some of Wharton's business letters, and notes with seeming sorrow that it is a shame Wharton wasn't writing more beautiful sentences. Fatuous and foolish.
November 14, 2011
This book was well written and impeccably researched. However, it is far too long and contains too many details that are not necessary and which do not illuminate the subject of Edith Wharton--her work and life. I experienced the book as a kind of seed catalogue and, while reading it, it occurred to me, in a politically incorrect nationalist fashion, that we would likely do better if an educated American, as opposed to a British woman with a decided penchant for writing biographies of our national icons (and Virginia Woolf, for which she gained her fame). This critical biography lacks national touch and does not quite do proper justice to one of our greatest writers--which is not to say that she does not praise Wharton, for she does. I found the sections on Wharton's two greatest masterpieces--The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence--helpful and insightful, but not nearly as much as I had hoped to find them. Further, their insights did not differ much from criticism by American scholars I had read elsewhere, and who wrote long before this volume was published. I also found some details about money and estates interesting, and useful in my own research, but that is not saying much. My sense is that this book has garnered so much applause because it chanced to come along at the right time and with the right subject.
February 17, 2013
There is a great chance out there for a good writer to offer a shorter, more insightful biography on the live of Edith Wharton. No offense to Ms. Lee who does an exhaustive job -- it's just a little too exhausting. Lengthy quotes from boring letters, gardening digressions that numb even those of us who like to read about gardening. She often gives detailed intros to friends who don't end up playing that strategic of a role in the author's live. Finally, I had to skim over most of her Cliff Note descriptions of virtually every book and short story Wharton wrote. Instead of an interesting summary coupled with commentary that relates the work to the author's life, I felt like I was getting a Wikipedia entry.
There is a lot of interesting material here, particularly about the publishing world of Wharton's time, her awkward mid-life affair, and the writers and artists she crossed paths with (or purposely avoided crossing paths with). Also, it's pretty easy to skip the less interesting parts. The author mentions that at the time she wrote the book many of Wharton's surviving letters hadn't been properly catalogued, and other material was turning up. The themes in Wharton's books and short stories are still relevant -- a good biographer might help more readers find the author's work.
There is a lot of interesting material here, particularly about the publishing world of Wharton's time, her awkward mid-life affair, and the writers and artists she crossed paths with (or purposely avoided crossing paths with). Also, it's pretty easy to skip the less interesting parts. The author mentions that at the time she wrote the book many of Wharton's surviving letters hadn't been properly catalogued, and other material was turning up. The themes in Wharton's books and short stories are still relevant -- a good biographer might help more readers find the author's work.
December 21, 2011
Early on in this hefty tome, I found myself enjoying it immensely. The approach is more thematic than chronological, so I wouldn't recommend this as a first introduction to the life of Edith Wharton - the RWB Lewis biography is still probably best for that. But this is still an engrossing new examination of Wharton as an artist, person and influencer. This book also has some of the best insights I've found so far into the complex relationship between Wharton, Henry James and his circle.
Once I finished the book, rather wishing it did not have to end, I concluded that likely no one will ever have the complete picture of this complex woman and artist, in part because she destroyed some of her correspondence along the way. As well, her closest relationships were with two equally enigmatic individuals - Walter Berry and Morton Fullerton. As challenging as this book has been, though, I'm glad I stuck with it because I think it is the fullest, most precise and most respectful portrait of the incomparable Mrs. Wharton. It also provides concise yet incisive analyses of all of her major works, including The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.
Once I finished the book, rather wishing it did not have to end, I concluded that likely no one will ever have the complete picture of this complex woman and artist, in part because she destroyed some of her correspondence along the way. As well, her closest relationships were with two equally enigmatic individuals - Walter Berry and Morton Fullerton. As challenging as this book has been, though, I'm glad I stuck with it because I think it is the fullest, most precise and most respectful portrait of the incomparable Mrs. Wharton. It also provides concise yet incisive analyses of all of her major works, including The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.
September 30, 2021
“I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
This biography was haunting. Edith Wharton was a very intelligent woman, to be sure. But she was a lonely, tortured soul that was searching for something she never found and fell in love with the wrong man (when she thought for a moment that she had found love). It was very well researched, but there are many gaps where letters have been burned and she has chosen to self edit her life by destroying evidence of her thoughts and feelings in important relationships, such as Walter Berry's correspondence with her.
Her mid-life love affair was disturbing to me - not an oasis in the desert of her lonely life - but a hole into which she stumbled with a very creepy, self serving man who had no scruples whatsoever. I will not remember this biography like I will Edna St. Vincent Millay's - I will endeavour to forget if I ever do recall anything (which I doubt), because I somehow felt incredibly sad and disturbed reading her life story.
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
This biography was haunting. Edith Wharton was a very intelligent woman, to be sure. But she was a lonely, tortured soul that was searching for something she never found and fell in love with the wrong man (when she thought for a moment that she had found love). It was very well researched, but there are many gaps where letters have been burned and she has chosen to self edit her life by destroying evidence of her thoughts and feelings in important relationships, such as Walter Berry's correspondence with her.
Her mid-life love affair was disturbing to me - not an oasis in the desert of her lonely life - but a hole into which she stumbled with a very creepy, self serving man who had no scruples whatsoever. I will not remember this biography like I will Edna St. Vincent Millay's - I will endeavour to forget if I ever do recall anything (which I doubt), because I somehow felt incredibly sad and disturbed reading her life story.
January 16, 2008
Listened to the abridged audiobook... can only imagine how many pages I would have skipped if I was reading it. The long descriptions of her gardens, the passages in untranslated French, the relationships among the Paris haute monde who I never heard of... there were many times I know I zoned out. I did enjoy, however, the analysis of her books, which I haven't read in a long time and long to go back to, although I can't because of the endless schoolwork. I was disappointed by Wharton's snobbishness, her haughty attitude to her publishers, her superiority over the Americans she chose to no longer live with. I don't begrudge her the choice to be an expatriot, to embrace all things French, and to live her life the way she wanted to live it. But in this biography, at any rate, she came across as terribly arrogant. I don't read novels because I like the author as a person, though, at least not as a general rule, so I don't think this insight into Wharton's character will make me less of a fan. It seems like the wittiest people tend to be insufferable on a personal level.
Read
February 5, 2009Edith Wharton had an unfortunate habit of burning her letters, which makes her an elusive topic for biographers. Critics enthusiastically agreed, however, that Hermione Lee succeeds in bringing Wharton to vibrant life. They were impressed by Lee's scholarship and unwillingness to speculate, as others have done before her, without proof. Instead, Lee teases out the details of Wharton's life by analyzing evidence that scholars often overlook: houses she decorated, travel itineraries, and reading lists. Most reviewers consider Lee, a Professor of English at Oxford, at her best when outlining and exploring Wharton's numerous works. Confidently dispelling myths that Wharton was a prudish spinster who mimicked the style of others, this voluminous biography reveals a fiercely independent woman ahead of her time.
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
May 4, 2015
I love this book. I visited Wharton's home, The Mount, in Lenox last month (2007) and became fascinated with the question of how a woman of high social standing, who received no formal education became an internationally acclaimed writer. Lee writes about how Wharton chronicled the shallowness and hypocrisies of high society in end of the 19c. Century NY while simultaneously detailing the norms of society, popular architecture, elements of interior design, and vividly describing the content and design of gardens in that historical period.
Maybe end note: 7 years later this book is still next to my bed. It is my go to book when I want to read something well written that will not keep me up. It never fails. It is the last book to read before going to sleep.. I get about 3 l, if lucky, 5 pages done before my eyes start to close.
I have 90 pages to go before I finish. That said, it might take me another 6 months to finish... Or longer. Need I say, this this not a fast read.
Maybe end note: 7 years later this book is still next to my bed. It is my go to book when I want to read something well written that will not keep me up. It never fails. It is the last book to read before going to sleep.. I get about 3 l, if lucky, 5 pages done before my eyes start to close.
I have 90 pages to go before I finish. That said, it might take me another 6 months to finish... Or longer. Need I say, this this not a fast read.
July 10, 2009
It's taken me forever to read this biography. But it was well worth it--an amazing writer and an amazing woman. (The fact that I read the Al Smith bio at the same time was interesting. They lived at the same time in the same city and you would think they were from different planets because they were). Hermione Lee is a wonderful dedicated biographer with a great style. Wharton's life is dense and it's slow-going, but I enjoyed it. I am grateful that her childhood letters weren't available to Lee (although there's probably much gnashing of teeth there) because it would have been another 100 pages. It is a look at a period that covered much of life and many different styles--Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway in the same universe. Life is never as tidy as teacher pretend and that's a good part of the fun.
October 22, 2010
A comprehensive biography of a writer whose novels I have long admired. Wharton was a keen observer of the milieu (upper class New York of the 1880s and 1890s) in which she came of age; as Hermione Lee comments, "...one of her achievements was to write with hard, penetrating, analytical realism about a society 'wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.'" (p. 32). Unfortunately she was also a racist, anti-Semitic and anti-feminist snob, which considerably diminished my enjoyment of this biography. Hermione Lee deserves great credit for her frankness about the less attractive aspects of Wharton's character. Although this biography is both thoroughly researched and very well written, it gets only three stars from me because I am so disappointed in Edith Wharton herself.
May 6, 2013
This book certainly wasn't missing any details. I could have done without some of the listing of the flowers in her garden, but in general I enjoyed the rich detail for making me feel like I had spent months in Wharton's company. She is a confusing character. Even Lee's more sympathetic than usual portrait of her makes it clear that she was stuffy, particular, demanding and bigoted, although a good friend to those she loved. It's hard to reconcile that image with the person behind books written with such compassion for her characters. I don't think she could have written so well without genuine feeling for her characters, including those who were extremely different from her. But then I guess that's why fiction exists in the first place. If we could know everything about other humans from the facts about their lives, we probably would have stuck with that.
November 8, 2012
For breadth and depth of research, and writing skills, this biography would get a 5. Man oh man, though, was this a chore of a book to get through. I guess I'm not a hardcore enough Edith Wharton fan to gush over this tome....the author actually lamented in the last chapter that no one has collected and edited all of Wharton's letters into one volume. Frankly, the extensive quotations from her letters here was more than enough for me. Also driving me crazy: probably 50 pages total of UNTRANSLATED French (???!!!!) and lists of completely inane things, like all the wines Wharton ordered for one of her houses, all the books she read in a certain year, etc. I'm so glad to be done with this thing finally!
July 23, 2008
I know this says "read" and it's part-way true. I read the first chapter and a half. Seriously, folks. I was all pumped to read about the life of Edith Wharton, but what did I get instead? A one million-page thesis on Wharton's life and works. Too big to fit in my purse and carry around for my weekday commute, this book got pushed aside for smaller, more accessible pieces of work. No thank you to this one.
December 16, 2008
I have been struggling through Hermione Lee's exceptionally well-written biography about Edith Wharton. It is actually quite readable but it 750 pages long and that is quite a time commitment for all but the most dedicated Wharton fans.
Having said that, if you have any interest in Edith Wharton, this is an exceptional and quite readable biography and I do highly recommend it. It is worth the time investment if you are a fan of Wharton, American literature and/or women in history.
Having said that, if you have any interest in Edith Wharton, this is an exceptional and quite readable biography and I do highly recommend it. It is worth the time investment if you are a fan of Wharton, American literature and/or women in history.
December 30, 2009
A literary biography for people who 1) never thought they would read a literary biography, 2) think Edith Wharton was an uninteresting person, 2) didn't particularly care for the film , The Age of Innocence. Chapter on her work during WWI in France worth the price of the book.
June 20, 2008
What should've been a fascinating look at a fascinating woman was just plain boring. I was really disappointed.
Read
July 4, 2012Each morning I think about putting this book in my bag, perform a quick interestingness-to-poundage calculation, and leave it at home.
I've been stuck a quarter of the way through for a month.
I've been stuck a quarter of the way through for a month.
September 26, 2012
I got tired around page 100 of how much the book talked about other people and compared them all to characters in her novels. It's a good book just a little too academic scholarship for me.
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