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Overview
A rich and powerful new life of the great novelist. It overturns the accepted view, displaying her as a tough, erotically brave, startlingly modern writer.
The name Edith Wharton conjures up Gilded Age New York in all its snobbery and ruthlessness — the world of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth. But this definitive biography by Hermione Lee overturns the stereotype. Her Edith Wharton is not the genteel, nostalgic chronicler of a vanished age but a fiercely modern woman, writing of sex and incest, love and war — a woman of passionate conviction and conflicting ambitions.
Born in 1862, Wharton broke away from her wealthy background. She travelled adventurously in Europe, eventually settling in France, her “second country” until her death in 1937. She created fabulous homes in New England and in France, and her life was filled with remarkable friends, including Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She ran her professional life with fierce energy, but she also had her secrets, including a passionate mid-life love affair, recorded in a coded diary. Unhappily married, childless and divorced, she knew loneliness and anguish. Her brilliant and disturbing fiction shows her deep understanding of the longing and struggle in women’s lives.
In this masterly new biography, Hermione Lee shifts the emphasis to Europe, placing Wharton in her social context and history. It shows in fascinating detail how she worked and what lies at the heart of her magnificent books.
Finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
Synopsis
The definitive biography of one of America's greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf. Born in 1862, Edith 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. 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. With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far 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.
The Washington Post - Diane Johnson
This meticulous, generous biography is likely to suffice for a long time. The virtue of such a compendious work from a distinguished biographer is that one can at last grasp the full range of Wharton's writing and the full power of her energy.
Editorials
Claire Messud
Nobody has done Edith Wharton such careful justice as Lee, who has brilliantly illuminated so many of the rooms in Wharton's vast interior house. But perhaps precisely because these rooms are so fully furnished and their trappings so well rendered, it is at times difficult to see clearly, or indeed fully to embrace, the lonely innermost soul herself. Such detachment is undoubtedly the biographer's job; but it also reflects, as Wharton unflinchingly believed, what life is like.— The New York Times
Diane Johnson
This meticulous, generous biography is likely to suffice for a long time. The virtue of such a compendious work from a distinguished biographer is that one can at last grasp the full range of Wharton's writing and the full power of her energy.— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Kate Reading's dulcet tones, buttery and tuneful, make her sound more like a Wharton character than an audiobook reader. As it turns out, this is a very good thing, for Reading (named a "Voice of the Century" by AudioFilemagazine) is exceptionally gifted when it comes to maintaining a uniform tone and holding on to listeners' attention. She confidently steers listeners through Lee's life of the great American writer and member of East Coast high society, which studies Wharton's personal and professional lives in thorough detail. Reading is subtle, choosing to modulate her voice, carefully restricting it to a pleasant middle register. Listening to her reading is like hearing a long but pleasant anecdote from a well-trained, masterful storyteller. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 29). (May)
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