|
...writer", "challenges the accepted view". All very irritating. The first suggests that former biographers had scant insight into her intricately layered life, the second that the respected biographer Hermione Lee needs be identified as a woman rather than simply a British writer, and the third that there is some accepted view of the remarkable Wharton, a kind of cuckoo in a brownstone nest, that needs to be challenged. Not so. The phenomenon of Edith Wharton, a writer more celebrated in her day than her friend Henry James (a fact he chafed at), was dissected by R.W.B. Lewis in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography published in 1975. It was a miracle of compression, insight and graceful writing, and would always be a difficult act to follow, as this new biography by Lee demonstrates.
Nevertheless, Lee's magisterial work will delight the forensically-minded Wharton fan, not so much for any new insights (this reviewer found few) but for "new archive material", and the sheer scale of the digressions and meanderings throughout its 845 pages. Indeed, she has succumbed to the biographer's greatest temptation--not knowing what to jettison. The reader gains the impression of wandering through a quarry mined by a writer who cannot bear to part with a single fragment of her findings. In one instance she devotes more than five pages (and the print is tiny) to a house that Wharton didn't buy, and the reader has to wait till page 306 for a physical description of Wharton, who by this time is forty-five.
Some of Lee's observations about Wharton are so delicately sustained that it comes as a shock for them to be seeded with such infelicitous expressions as: "It was typical of Edith's investment in mod cons", "She had four novels on the go at once", "The Depression era drop in her earnings in the Depression years" and so on.
Wharton was born in 1862 into an extended New York family whose money came principally from property investment, and she could count old New England families, the Rhinelanders and the Schermerhorns, among her forebears. She had a great affection for her father George Frederick Jones which was returned in abundance, and she was wary of her mother Lucretia (who was addicted to the social niceties and policed Edith relentlessly). As R.W.B. Lewis noted, the relationship between her mother and her father provided Wharton with one of her most central and sustained themes in her writing: "the larger spirit subdued and defeated by the smaller one".
Her family spent some years in Paris and the six-year-old Wharton, according to Lewis, would "associate Paris with the...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Quadrant
Bureaucrats versus Science.(The Trouble with Physics)(Book review), December 01, 2007
Glass Slipper.(Poem), December 01, 2007
In at the beginning.(Book review), December 01, 2007
Two knights of Australia.(Australia)(A Public Life: The Memoirs of Zel..., December 01, 2007
The Treekeeper's Tale.(Poem), December 01, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.
Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication
name or publication date.
About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company
analysis or best practices in managing your organization,
Goliath can help you meet your business needs.
Our extensive business information databases empower business
professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible,
authoritative information they need to support their business
goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting,
company research or defining management best practices -
Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.
|
