In the house of 'Edith Wharton'
The American author captured every detail of the society she fought to escape.
from the May 15, 2007 edition
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Denied an outlet for romantic or familial love, Wharton was generous and loyal to her friends. She helped support her sister-in-law and niece after her brother's divorce, for example, and secretly funneled money to Henry James ($8,000 – about $160,000 today) through a ruse involving her publisher.
Lee, author of an acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf, had access to letters and other materials unavailable when R.W.B. Lewis wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Wharton in 1975. She makes full use of both these and her exhaustive knowledge of Wharton's writing to create what deserves to be known as the definitive biography.
Lee overturns stereotypes, such as Wharton's reputation as a lesser "female Henry James," and refutes rumors that Wharton had affairs with two male friends, a lawyer and an art dealer. She doesn't gloss over Wharton's failings, but instead sets them in context.
"Edith Wharton" is meticulous and authoritative – sometimes at the cost of readability. (And if you were foolish enough to study a language other than French, Lee is not inclined to help you, even though she quotes extensively. Wharton was so fluent she wrote the first draft of "Ethan Frome" in French.)
Interestingly, neither the beginning nor the end of the biography are particularly memorable: Lee starts with Wharton's parents' honeymoon tour through Europe and ends with her own visit to Wharton's neglected grave, where she tidies up and plants a silk azalea at which, she notes, Wharton probably would have sneered. But in between, there is a wealth of investigation and first-rate analysis, all the more impressive because Wharton destroyed a lot of correspondence and censored her own diary.
"A woman's environment will speak for her life, whether she likes it or not," Wharton wrote in her nonfiction "The Decoration of Homes." It was a technique that she employed brilliantly in her own writing, and Lee has made good use of that advice here.
• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.
Excerpts from "Edith Wharton" by Hermione Lee
[Edith Wharton] 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."
* * *
My first attempt (at the age of eleven) was a novel, which began: "Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?" said Mrs. Tompkins. "If only I had known you were going to call, I should have tidied up the drawing room." Timorously, I submitted this to my mother, and never shall I forget the sudden drop in my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment: "Drawing rooms are always tidy."
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