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Description
THE MODERN PUBLISHING world is more often than not captive to its market-place, thus the prospective reader of a new biography of Edith Wharton is treated to giddy recommendations on its back cover. "A rich new life of a great novelist", "first biography of Edith Wharton by a British woman 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 to 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... |
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