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Summary
Summary
Delving into heretofore untapped sources, the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf brilliantly interweaves Edith 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.
Author Notes
Hermione Lee is the first woman Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her books include a major biography of Virginia Woolf; studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth; and a collection of essays on life-writing, Virginia Woolf's Nose . Also a well-known critic, Lee served as the Chair of Judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2006. She lives in Oxford and Yorkshire.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 AudioFile magazine) 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. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Likely to replace R. W. B. Lewis' groundbreaking Edith Wharton (1975) as the definitive biographical treatment, because of new sources (as well as the author's sensitive interpretation of these sources), Lee's tremendous biography of one of the most important American writers rises to landmark status, the same level achieved by her previous Virginia Woolf (1997). Generally thought of as the grand dame of American letters, Edith Wharton grew up and married in New York City high society and subsequently wrote about that milieu. Her popular image as handed down from her generation onward is that of a character from the pages of her own fiction: a grand, stiff society matron. But the formidable Mrs. Wharton is given great humanity here. Lee conducts an enlightening exploration of the rarefied yet, ironically, provincial and narrow world of Wharton's formative years, which were undergoing a jostle of social forces between old and new money. Those very conflicts supplied her with the material she exploited throughout her long career. Upon her sad marriage, which eventually ended in divorce, Lee casts sympathetic and clarifying light. And in weighing Wharton's considerable time spent living in Europe, Lee brings to the fore Wharton's continued American consciousness. As expected for such a respected biographer of writers, Lee nimbly integrates analysis of Wharton's works into the bigger life story. The adjacent Read-alikes column\b suggests additional first-rate biographies of American women writers. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In her short story "The Fullness of Life," Edith Wharton wrote that a woman's life is like "a great house full of rooms," most of which remain unseen: "and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes." In spite of the many books written about Wharton and her work - including R. W. B. Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1975 biography - it is Hermione Lee's determination to provide an unprecedented tour of all the rooms in Edith Wharton's mansion. The text is unquestionably authoritative, impressively - indeed, almost alarmingly - exhaustive (it includes lists of Wharton's neighbors, of fellow hotel guests, of the ads surrounding her published stories, of the wines in her cellars); and it seeks, with meticulous care, to approach the soul in her innermost sanctum. This is a daunting undertaking: Edith Wharton was formidable, multifaceted, guarded and phenomenally busy. Between 1897 and 1937, the year of her death, she published at least one book a year. Altogether she wrote 48. Her posthumous reputation has suffered somewhat in comparison with that of her friend Henry James (as Lee points out, "to this day it is still rare for a book or an essay or a talk on Wharton not to mention James," though "this has not worked the other way"), but Wharton is a literary master - or mistress - in her own right. While only a handful of her books are still widely read, her finest fictions - including "The House of Mirth," "The Custom of the Country," "Ethan Frome" and "The Age of Innocence" - remain as affecting and engrossing today as when they first appeared (when many of them were best sellers), unsentimental illuminations of America in a time of social transition and rich explorations of the unspoken human heart. Moreover, as Lee's biography makes clear, Wharton was also significant as a designer, decorator, gardener, traveler and philanthropist, making her prolific literary production but a part of her life's work. Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York City on Jan. 24, 1862, into considerable prosperity: "If the Joneses were not Astors or Vanderbilts," writes Lee, "they gave off a pretty well-upholstered air." Raised partly in Europe, like Henry James, she had two older brothers and a difficult mother. Her father, of whom she was immensely fond, died when Wharton was only 20. In her late teens she wrote a novel and published poems (including in The Atlantic Monthly), but she would not fulfill her literary promise until her middle years. At the age of 23, she married Teddy Wharton, an apparently solid if conventional man 12 years her senior, and embarked upon the life expected of a young woman of her station, settling near her mother in fashionable Newport. While superficially comfortable, it was a time of constraint and depression. Much later, in 1912, Lee writes, Wharton told Bernard Berenson "that she suffered from 'unget-attable nausea for 12 years,' a kind of 'seasickness' which was cured when she moved from Newport to Lenox." The move to Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires, entailed the design and construction of Wharton's famous house there, the Mount, which is now open to visitors, and to which a substantial portion of her library has recently been returned. Following on the heels of her influential first book, "The Decoration of Houses" (1897), which she wrote with a friend, the architect Ogden Codman, the move coincided more or less with the publication of her first novel, "The Valley of Decision" (1902), and with her nonfiction book "Italian Villas and Their Gardens" (1904). At around the age of 40, Edith Wharton, like an aging Sleeping Beauty, at last came to life - at least professionally. The novel that made her name, "The House of Mirth," published in 1905, is the searing account of the struggles and spiraling descent of Lily Bart, a young woman whose youth is slipping away, and with it her prospects. As Lee observes, "she is always losing her opportunities, because she cannot quite turn herself into a commodity." Lily's failures reflect the importance of money, and self-marketing, for women in late-19th-century American society, and Wharton's assessment is brutal. The book was scandalous, and popular: it sold 30,000 copies in the first three weeks after its publication, and 140,000 in its first year. In the wake of this success, Wharton became, in every sense, a grande dame, who could no longer complain that she was a failure in Boston because she was "too fashionable to be intelligent" and in New York because she was "too intelligent to be fashionable." In spite of this literary blossoming, and although she was bolstered by close male friends like Henry James and the aristocratic international lawyer Walter Berry (to whom she was so close, for so many years, that many wrongly assumed they were lovers), Wharton struggled with the isolation of an unsatisfying marriage, and with Teddy's increasingly erratic behavior. In 1906, the Whartons settled in Paris; and soon thereafter, through Henry James, she met the louche American journalist Morton Fullerton, with whom she had her life's one truly passionate love affair. Dashing and attractive, he was not a reliable choice: "When Morton Fullerton met Edith Wharton in 1907, he had a potentially scandalous homosexual past, a French wife whom he had divorced with startling rapidity, a blackmailing mistress in whose house he was still living (for convenience, not as a lover), and a frustrated career" - and that was just for starters. R. W. B. Lewis first revealed the details of this affair, but Lee provides a fuller picture of their intimacy, and of Wharton's moving vulnerability in the relationship. WHETHER the affair precipitated the collapse of the Whartons' marriage, or whether Teddy's decline would have done so regardless, the couple were finally divorced in 1913, just at the time when her "novel of American divorce" (as Lee puts it), "The Custom of the Country," was published. World War I followed fast upon this change in Edith Wharton's circumstances, and she threw herself into war work of various indispensable kinds, as well as bravely visiting the front with Walter Berry (an episode conveyed vividly by Lewis and in greater detail by Lee). It was a period that cemented her commitment to France and during which Wharton, furious at the neutrality of her native country, wrote and edited various propagandistic works, both of fiction and nonfiction. After the war, Wharton divided her time between a villa she named Pavillon Colombe, in St.-Brice, north of Paris, and a chateau, Ste.-Claire, in the town of Hyères, on the Côte d'Azur. In both places, she restored her houses and their gardens to order and beauty; and, with the help of her devoted staff (her housekeeper, Catherine Gross, was with Wharton from 1884 until Gross's death in 1933), entertained her close, largely male, circle of friends. Lee's biography is a remarkable feat, as she marshals with aplomb vast amounts of information about Wharton, her passions (literature, houses, gardens, travel), her lives (social and literary, American, Italian, French and British), and her acquaintances, both actual and on the page (she greatly admired Proust, for example, but never met him, although they were both in Paris). Lee's readings of the novels, stories and poems range from the inspired to the dutiful, which may reflect the effort involved in revisiting some of Wharton's lesser works. But she is unfailingly astute in her articulation of Wharton's central themes, from "The House of Mirth" to her heartbreaking masterpiece, "The Age of Innocence," to her final, unfinished novel, "The Buccanneers." As Lee sums it up, "She is interested in the negotiation between the desires of individuals and the pressures of convention, and she is fascinated by equivocation." Lee exposes the ways in which Wharton's fictions drew obliquely but powerfully upon her own life and, with unprecedented success, sets their political and feminist significance firmly in context. Given Wharton's own fleeting and doomed romance with Fullerton, there is particular poignancy in Lee's observation that in "The Age of Innocence," Wharton in the end "chose unfulfillment for her lovers. That is what life is like, she tells us. Perhaps we are even meant to feel that there is some value for the soul in not getting what you want." In the end, too, there is about Hermione Lee's remarkable biography a slight air of unfulfillment, as if for her biographer Wharton were ultimately more an admirable effort than a beloved subject. (It is an air, incidentally, completely absent from Lee's marvelous "Virginia Woolf," a more thoroughly absorbing and affecting book.) 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. Wharton was 'too fashionable to be intelligent' in Boston and 'too intelligent to be fashionable' in New York. Claire Messud's most recent novel is "The Emperor's Children."
Choice Review
This biography of Wharton re-creates, with a multitude of minutiae, the often-stifling circumstances of her life. Lee (Oxford Univ.) opens with Wharton's recently married parents floundering in France amid the revolution of 1848, an appropriate place to begin a biography of a writer who would make such a significant contribution to modernism. The author diligently traces Wharton's childhood and adolescent path, pointing out, among many other details, Wharton's early engagement to Henry Leyden Stevens and his subsequent breaking off of the engagement because Wharton was too "intellectual." As Wharton enters her writing period, Lee painstakingly draws analogies between Wharton's personal life and the fiction she produces. For example, of the House of Mirth's main character, Lily Bart, she writes, "Lily acts out a parallel--but much less successful--version of her author's professional career." The linking of Wharton's private life with her fiction is interesting, though surmise. More fascinating is discussion of Wharton's intimate and sustaining relationships with other women. This biography provides the reader with insights into the large and small events of Wharton's life but not an aggregate picture of the writer as a vibrant individual. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general readers. J. M. Wood Park University
Guardian Review
In her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934), Edith Wharton recalled her first attempts at writing when she was 11 years old. Her fledgling novel began: "Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown? . . . If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room." But when little Edith shyly offered it to her mother, the stately New York matron Lucretia Newbold Jones, the response was chilly and withering: "Drawing-rooms are always tidy." The anecdote is a favourite of Wharton's biographers, and Hermione Lee quotes it early in her monumentally conceived and impressively executed study of Wharton's life and times. All the seeds of Wharton's work and psyche are contained therein - her fascination with the ethnography of upper-class societies from old New York to the Parisian faubourg, and her obsession with interior decor and its suggestive symbolism of the pristine female body. Throughout her life, Wharton struggled to free her subversive imagination from the bonds imposed upon her by her past. Most sensationally, she had a passionate affair at the age of 46 with a younger American journalist, Morton Fullerton, and left her accounts of it for posterity to discover, a fact first revealed by RWB Lewis in his 1975 biography. In novels such as Summer (1917), she explored the issues of erotic tension in unhappy marriages, while a manuscript fragment, "Beatrice Palmato", is an explicit, almost pornographic, account of father-daughter incest. (Lee calls it "lush and dated", and wryly notes that "reticence has its stylistic advantages".) Wharton had a late start as a novelist, becoming a professional writer in her late 30s. But she was disciplined and productive, publishing 48 books, including collections of short stories, novellas, poems, essays, travel writing and literary criticism. How should a biographer find a key to a writer so varied? Lee approaches Wharton as "an American in Paris", a writer who broke away from the roots of her own American upbringing to live abroad, and whose deepest connections were to European culture and European values. In her work and life, Wharton repudiated the customs of her country, including the slangy sounds of her mother-tongue. "My first weeks in America are always miserable," she wrote to her friend Sally Norton upon one return from France in 1903. " . . . All of which outburst is due to my first sight of American streets, my first hearing of American voices, & the wild, disheveled, backwoods look of everything when one first comes home!" The following year, her alienation had increased: "A whole nation developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast." How a country she found so aesthetically abrasive, intellectually uncongenial and culturally primitive could in fact be Wharton's "home", and how her cultural exile formed her literary art, are among the themes Lee pursues in this comprehensive and insightful book. Acknowledged in the last few decades as a major American writer, and newly popular since the filming of several of her novels, Wharton has been the subject of many biographical studies, critical revisions and ideological controversies. She has been described as a woman who hated women; a survivor of childhood sexual abuse; the victim of an unstable and deceitful husband and a painful divorce; a neurasthenic who was treated by the notorious rest-cure specialist Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. Lee rejects all of these labels as unproven - there is no evidence for abuse, for example - or oversimplified. None comes close to explaining her genius, and they underestimate her "toughness and resolve". Lee also gives relatively short shrift to more recent, politically charged critiques of Wharton's snobbery, racism and anti-semitism. She frankly notes the blunt references to "Yids" and other racial and ethnic slurs in Wharton's letters (deleted or omitted by early editors), but places them against the richer, more complex and contradictory contexts of the fiction. Lee is out to understand Wharton, not to vilify or sanctify her. She gives a much fuller account of Wharton's working methods than anyone has before, looking at manuscript revisions, and at Wharton's many tantalisingly unfinished stories and novels. She seems to have read everything Wharton wrote, and all that has been written about her; and she is a discriminating and generous critic who offers full, fresh and incisive discussions of all the novels and scores of the short stories. She traces Wharton's strenuous intellectual self- formation, from her early reading of Darwin, Spencer, Nietzsche, Huxley, Frazer and Veblen, to her mature studies of European painting and art. She delicately untangles the psychological and literary intricacies of Wharton's friendship with Henry James, who both was and was not her Master and mentor in the novel, and whose influence she both cherished and derided. Wharton's generously intended but sometimes botched schemes to funnel money to James, the social geometry of her friendships and rivalries with James's homosexual and bisexual circle at Howard Sturgis's English country house Qu'Acre, his serio-comic efforts to resist her powerful personality (he called her the Firebird and the Eagle) and her futile efforts to escape being pigeon-holed as his imitator and heiress make this an inexhaustibly fascinating subject for analysis. Lee also pays close attention to Wharton's often overlooked work for France in the first world war, her many books and efforts on behalf of the French cause and her anger, outrage and shame regarding US foreign policy before America entered the war. To the French, Lee points out, Wharton was "an American who loved France and whose novels brilliantly explained America to the French". She was also admired, and felt at home, in England, where she once hoped to buy a great country house. But her self-created, self-aggrandising position as the exceptional American abroad, the anti-American American, also had its pitfalls for her art. Lee calls The Custom of the Country (1913) her greatest novel, rightly praising it as "tightly themed, highly controlled". But Lee could say more about the limitations of Wharton's ferocious attack on American capitalism, consumerism and acquisitiveness. Custom is also Wharton's most obtuse statement about the promise of democracy. Her anti-heroine Undine Spragg is indeed avaricious, ruthless and vain, a midwestern Becky Sharp; but Wharton also mocks Undine's lack of sensitivity to class distinctions, and absence of religious prejudice, as signs of provincial ignorance. When a French aristocrat denounces Undine, he also condemns an entire pioneer nation: "You come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they are dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding on to what we have." Although Wharton had travelled extensively in England, France, Italy, Germany and north Africa, she had seen little of the United States beyond New England and New York. In the decades that followed, she would retell and reframe her expatriate story of "nostalgia and distaste", while other American novelists such as Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson were exploring the dreams and tragedies of the inhabitants of those small towns. In her book Body Parts: Writing About Lives , Lee discusses the problems of ending biographies, particularly dealing with the subject's death; should it be milked for pathos and meaning or understated? She de-dramatises Wharton's death from a stroke in August 1937. But she also chooses to end her lengthy biography with an anecdote, rather than a considered summing-up and celebration of Wharton's literary achievement, and in the absence of a critical conclusion, that anecdote bears a lot of weight. In her final pages, Lee describes her pilgrimage to Wharton's "plain, rather ugly" grave outside Versailles: "The tomb was covered with weeds, old bottles, and a very ancient pot of dead flowers. Clearly no one had been there for a long time." To Lee, the untended, unvisited grave suggests the anomaly and the cost of Wharton's permanent exile and deracination. In the rain, she "weeded Edith" and decorated her grave with a silk azalea bought from the cemetery flower-shop. "She would probably have been scornful about the artificial flower, but would, I felt, have been glad to have her grave tidied up." In this diminishing and muted ending, one hears the echo of Lucretia Newbold Jones: "Graves are always tidy." But neither Wharton nor the reader should have cause for complaint. Elaine Showalter is writing a literary history of American women's writing from 1650 to 2000. To order Edith Wharton for pounds 23 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-wharton.1 [Hermione Lee] is out to understand [Edith Wharton], not to vilify or sanctify her. She gives a much fuller account of Wharton's working methods than anyone has before, looking at manuscript revisions, and at Wharton's many tantalisingly unfinished stories and novels. She seems to have read everything Wharton wrote, and all that has been written about her; and she is a discriminating and generous critic who offers full, fresh and incisive discussions of all the novels and scores of the short stories. She traces Wharton's strenuous intellectual self- formation, from her early reading of Darwin, Spencer, Nietzsche, Huxley, Frazer and Veblen, to her mature studies of European painting and art. She delicately untangles the psychological and literary intricacies of Wharton's friendship with Henry James, who both was and was not her Master and mentor in the novel, and whose influence she both cherished and derided. Wharton's generously intended but sometimes botched schemes to funnel money to James, the social geometry of her friendships and rivalries with James's homosexual and bisexual circle at Howard Sturgis's English country house Qu'Acre, his serio-comic efforts to resist her powerful personality (he called her the Firebird and the Eagle) and her futile efforts to escape being pigeon-holed as his imitator and heiress make this an inexhaustibly fascinating subject for analysis. Lee also pays close attention to Wharton's often overlooked work for France in the first world war, her many books and efforts on behalf of the French cause and her anger, outrage and shame regarding US foreign policy before America entered the war. In her book Body Parts: Writing About Lives , Lee discusses the problems of ending biographies, particularly dealing with the subject's death; should it be milked for pathos and meaning or understated? She de-dramatises Wharton's death from a stroke in August 1937. But she also chooses to end her lengthy biography with an anecdote, rather than a considered summing-up and celebration of Wharton's literary achievement, and in the absence of a critical conclusion, that anecdote bears a lot of weight. In her final pages, Lee describes her pilgrimage to Wharton's "plain, rather ugly" grave outside Versailles: "The tomb was covered with weeds, old bottles, and a very ancient pot of dead flowers. Clearly no one had been there for a long time." To Lee, the untended, unvisited grave suggests the anomaly and the cost of Wharton's permanent exile and deracination. In the rain, she "weeded Edith" and decorated her grave with a silk azalea bought from the cemetery flower-shop. "She would probably have been scornful about the artificial flower, but would, I felt, have been glad to have her grave tidied up." In this diminishing and muted ending, one hears the echo of [Lucretia Newbold Jones]: "Graves are always tidy." But neither Wharton nor the reader should have cause for complaint. - Elaine Showalter.
Kirkus Review
Absorbing life of the expatriate novelist and socialite whose work, though not widely read today, underlies film after film. She was hailed as both a "citizen of the world" and "the last Victorian writer" when she died 70 years ago. Edith Wharton was indeed an accomplished traveler who transcended idle moneyed tourism to endure a few discomforts in search of an interesting story. Still, as Lee (Virginia Woolf, 1997, etc.) tells us, Wharton came up in wealth and enjoyed every ounce of accumulated privilege, which included the wherewithal to build splendid neo-palaces and restore real ones--and manors and farmhouses and gardens. She lived abroad in post-Gilded Age luxury thanks to the inheritance of three fortunes and, for at least part of her life, a solid income as a writer. Wharton, Lee allows, had the prejudices of her age and class; on her deathbed, she "talked about her love of Balzac, her strong feelings for the Catholic Church and her dislike of Jews." Yet she was a pioneer who took the circumstances of her own life, such as her unhappy marriage to a depressive alcoholic, and turned them into romans à clef such as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. The Wharton who emerges as a vigorous and visible presence in these pages loved life, was at home in many languages and places and was free of other kinds of prejudices; she may be one of the earliest American writers to have used the word "gay" in its modern connotation. She was also a brilliant writer, recognized as such in her time, mentioned in the same breath as Henry James, with whom she had a long relationship--and who is now mentioned less than she, at least "as an indicator for certain subjects: wealth, social status, old New York." An exemplary biography of a not-always-exemplary subject. Sure to be the standard work on Wharton for years to come. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Lee (English, Oxford Univ.) has already tackled several prominent women modernists in her scholarly biographies of Virginia Woolf (1997) and Willa Cather (1990). Here, she presents an exhaustively researched and incredibly detailed biography of American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Lee succeeds in eclipsing R.W.B. Lewis's excellent eponymous Wharton biography of 1975. Her conscientious research and attunement to her subject render a three-dimensional portrait of this complex woman. Wharton defied the conventions of her time and station in life to live an unusual and productive life, authoring numerous novels and short stories and becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for a novel (The Age of Innocence, 1921). Lee teases out the ways in which Wharton's personal life-her unhappy marriage to a sportsman husband with no intellectual interests; her short, mid-life affair with "frightful bounder" Morton Fullerton; her ambiguous relationship to society-informed her writing, adding to our understanding of both the woman and her literary output. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.-Alison M. Lewis, Drexel Univ. Lib., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One: An American in Paris In Paris, in February 1848, a young American couple on their Grand Tour of Europe found themselves, to their surprise, in the middle of a French revolution. Up to then, the travels of George Frederic Jones and his wife of three years, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, with their one-year-old son, Frederic, had been undramatic. They had a lengthy European itinerary, the usual thing for Americans of their class, backed by the substantial funds of the Jones family, one of the leading, old-established New York clans. Starting in England and Paris in April 1847, they had "done" Brussels, Amsterdam, Hanover, Berlin and Dresden, Prague, Linz, Salzburg and Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Coblenz, Friburg, Geneva, Lake Como and the major Italian cities. George Frederic, at twenty-seven an experienced traveller (his father had taken him on his first European tour when he was seventeen), was able to indulge all his appetites for architecture, scenery, paintings, collectable objects, shopping, theatre, entertainment and seeing life. "Lu," though more limited by looking after little Frederic and by her frequent illnesses and "her tremendous headaches," was very definite about what she liked and did not like on her first trip abroad: "Lu rather disgusted with the Catholic ceremonies." [1] George Frederic voiced his own prejudices confidently all over Europe. "More disgusted than ever with London . . . London prices are fearful . . . Decidedly disgusted with Milan." In Amsterdam, "the smell from the canal in most parts of the city fearful . . . Drove to the Jewish synagoage [ sic ] . . . but as soon as the carriage stopped, we were surrounded by such an infernal-looking set of scoundrels that we gave it up in disgust." (But he enjoyed the Breughels.) In a Berlin restaurant, "the company mostly men, all hard eating, hard drinking, loud talking and very little refinement anywhere." In the Dresden picture gallery, he was "much pleased" with the card players of Caravaggio, and a head of Christ by Guido. (Just the sort of thing that the "simpler majority" of nineteenth-century American tourists always liked and bought copies of, Edith Wharton would remark.)[2] In the Prague Cabinet of Antiquities, "the cameos were particularly beautiful, one, the apotheosis of Augustus, is said to have cost 12,000 ducats." In Venice he was very pleased with the Palace of the Doges [the Palazzo Ducale]. In Florence he rated the Pitti Palace "a much finer gallery than the other." But his heart belonged to Paris. When they first landed at Boulogne at the start of the trip, he wrote: "Glad to be again in France." Once they settled into their rooms on the Champs-Élysées, everything interested him: the Palais Royal, the Louvre, the riding at Franconi's, the flower market, a new ballet at the Académie Royale ("some pretty grouping but on the whole rather tedious"), the Hôtel des Invalides where they were building a chapel to contain the remains of Napoleon. Meanwhile, Lu, as her daughter would note, was buying clothes, among them "a white satin bonnet trimmed with white marabout and crystal drops . . . and a 'capeline' of gorge de pigeon taffetas with a wreath of flowers in shiny brown kid, which was one of the triumphs of her Paris shopping."[3] After the long tour, back in Paris early in 1848, they were all set to resume their busy schedule of pleasurable activities. But on 22 February 1848, walking down from their hotel, the Windsor in the Rue de Rivoli, to the Place de la Concorde at 11 a.m. to see the results of the Reform Banquet, George Frederic found it had been put a stop to, and that an immense and very excited crowd had gathered. (Opposition parties, prevented from calling large-scale political meetings, had set up "reform banquets" all over France, where speeches were made against the government and toasts to reform were drunk. The one scheduled in Paris was prevented by order of Louis- Philippe and his regime: that was the spark for the upheaval.) By 4 p.m., barricades were being built and troops were out "in immense numbers." "Matters in a state of great uncertainty," George Frederic reported. On the 23rd, he heard of "considerable fighting" and of the resignation of François Guizot, the chief minister, and his government. On the 24th, there was heavy fighting, and they could see much of the action from their window: "The whole city in a complete state of insurrection." The National Guard had joined the uprising. He "took Lu out to see the state of things, but she was so much frightened that we could not go far." On the way back they heard a great firing in the Place Vendôme and so "had to beat a hasty and most undignified retreat through the side streets." Louis-Philippe abdicated and fled with his wife across the Tuileries gardens, witnessed from their balcony by the Joneses. (Her mother, Wharton said, was more interested in what the queen was wearing than in the political crisis.) The people pillaged the palace, and a provisional government was declared. "Immense enthusiasm for the Republic. The tricolor cocade [ sic ] universally worn." By 28 February, order was restored, but George Frederic Jones "had no confidence in the present state of things. Think the French entirely unsuited to a Republic." The next day, he (and Paris) were beginning to get back to normal: an evening show at the Palais Royal, followed by dinner at the Trois Frères; an Italian opera (where the "Marseillaise" was sung between the acts); a masked ball at the Grand Opera, very amusing; letter-writing, an outing to the vaudeville. But there was "not so much refinement as before--everything too democratic and republican." At the opera, he found "a great change in the appearance of the audience--everyone very little dressed." And it was more and more difficult to procure money through letters of credit. On 15 May there was a massive street demonstration in support of revolutionary governments in eastern Europe ("Another remarkable day in French history . . . deep-laid conspiracy to overthrow the government . . . great alarm . . . Paris looked like a besieged city"). But the Joneses were leaving for "stupid and uninteresting" London--and then home to New York. "Leave Paris with great regret, which, changed though it is since the Revolution, is more agreeable than any place I ever was in."[4] Nearly seventy years later, a lifetime away, Edith Wharton was in Paris at the outbreak of the European war of 1914, watching the behaviour of the people in the streets, gauging the political and social temperature, and coming to her own firm conclusions about this nation in wartime. As she watched the mobilisation of conscripts and volunteers, the throng of foot-passengers in the streets, the incessant comings and goings of civilians under martial law, the crowd's quiet responses to the first battle news, and, gradually, the influx into the city of "the great army of refugees," she was struck by the "steadiness of spirit," the orderliness and "unanimity of self- restraint" of Paris at war. The contrast with 1848--or 1870--was extreme: "It seemed as though it had been unanimously, instinctively decided that the Paris of 1914 should in no respect resemble the Paris of 1870." As war conditions became the norm, she noted that the Parisians had started to shop again, to go to concerts and theatres and the cinema. But she noted, too, a consistent look on the faces of the French at war--grave, steady and stoic.[5] Wharton set to, and did what she could for France in wartime, including writing that account, "The Look of Paris," mainly for the benefit of an American public as yet unsure about joining the battle. For the next four years she sacrificed much of her life as a writer and a private citizen to her work for war victims and to proselytising for France. She became--it was not surprising to those who knew her--a high-powered administrator and benefactor. And though this was her period of greatest involvement with French public life, for which she was honoured with the Légion d'honneur in 1916, her attention and commitment to "French ways and their meaning" continued. As an old lady, long since disgusted with post-war Paris, hardened in her political opposition to anything that smacked of "Bolshevism," living in seclusion in her winter house on the Mediterranean, she listened intently in February 1934 to the news on the wireless of the bloody anti-government demonstrations in Paris. She feared for her property and for the future of her adopted country. "I do find it rather depressing to sit alone in the evenings & wonder what's happening in Paris," she wrote from Hyères to her friend Bernard Berenson.[6] Between these nineteenth- and twentieth-century American versions of Paris in crisis is the gap of a generation, of historical change, and of widely differing personal knowledge and experience. Edith Wharton turned her back on the genteel dilettantism of George Frederic and Lucretia Jones. She was a knowledgeable inhabitant and lover of France, not a tourist; a writer, not a leisured traveller keeping a diary. In this, as in many other ways, she broke with her parents' attitudes and customs, and created a different kind of life for herself. No wonder there is a much-repeated rumour that Edith Jones was not George Frederic's daughter at all. (Wharton's own fictions of illegitimacy, adoption and hidden parentage fuel these intriguing stories.) In her accounts of her childhood, she seems a stranger in the house, a changeling child. That is how she described her parents' view of her in the unfinished, unpublished version of her autobiography, "Life and I." So different was she from what they wanted or expected that they "were beginning to regard me with fear, like some pale predestined child who disappears at night to dance with 'the little people.' " (One of her favourite poetic characters was the young woman who is spirited away to another world, and when she comes back cannot speak of it: "For Kilmeny had been she ken'd not where, And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare.")[7] But Wharton grew up neither pale nor predestined. With prolonged, hard-working, deliberate ambition, she pushed out and away from her family's mental habits, social rules and ways of life--of which that 1840s Grand Tour is a perfect example--to construct her own personal and professional revolution. All the same, George Frederic Jones's 1848 diary does provide a strong entry point for the life story of this European American. Wharton detached herself from her family, and defined herself against it, but in some ways she followed in a family pattern. Though she describes them as at bottom all provincial New Yorkers, they were forever Europe-bound. The Jones family lived in Italy and France, for financial reasons, between 1866 and 1872, and so set the course of Wharton's life: after those childhood years she would always think of herself as "an exile in America."[8] They went back to Europe for the sake of her father's health in 1881; father and daughter went sight-seeing together in Italy, with Ruskin in hand.[9] Her father died at Cannes in 1882. Her mother lived permanently in Paris from 1893 till her death in 1901. Her two much older brothers lived for many years--and died--in France. All the Joneses, not just Edith, were Americans settled in France; George Frederic's "great regret" at leaving Paris set the tone. There is a faint echo of George Frederic in Wharton's world travels. She remembered his enthusiasms affectionately, though she would be at pains to distinguish her own responses from his. He had, she recalled, "a vague enjoyment in 'sight-seeing,' unaccompanied by any artistic or intellectual curiosity, or any sense of the relation of things to each other"; all the same, he was "delighted to take me about."[10] Perhaps she was unfair to him, or unfair to the young man he had been years before her birth, with his avid, choosy pursuit of culture, his interest in the history and politics of the places he visited, his love of art and theatre, his quick prejudices. Wharton's travels were those of a connoisseur: highly informed, well-organised, passionate. But they connect to her father's eager tourism. All her life, she was greedy for cultural adventures and experiences, in France, England, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, North Africa and all round the Mediterranean. She acquired a profound knowledge of the places she went to. She prided herself on always getting off the beaten track. From her childhood years in Europe, she wrote and spoke and read three languages--French, German and Italian--fluently. She hardly ever went anywhere without writing a book about it. Above all, she wrote of France, drawing on it for three non-fiction books ( A Motor-Flight Through France , French Ways and Their Meaning , Fighting France ), and for many of her novels and stories, most notably Madame de Treymes , The Reef , The Custom of the Country , The Marne , A Son at the Front , The Children and The Gods Arrive. How French did she become? She spoke French immaculately and formally, though with a strong "English" accent. Her letters and her diaries are full of French words and phrases, almost instinctively used. Much of her correspondence--and her conversation--was in French. She was divorced through the French courts, in order to avoid American publicity. She dealt with every aspect of French bureaucracy, law and administration, particularly in wartime, with tremendous competence. She had numerous French friends, French publishers and French readers. She could write fiction in French and closely supervised her French translators. After her Paris years, she bought and redesigned two French houses and gardens, and became involved in her local communities. Whether she dreamed or thought in French we do not know. What we do know is that she remained an American citizen and continued, in spite of her almost thirty years of life in France, to write in English principally about American life and American character. When Wharton was awarded the Légion d'honneur she was described in France as " une des personnalités les plus connues de la colonie américaine ." When she died, and was buried at Versailles, her French obituaries noted that though she was a French settler and a cosmopolitan traveller, this did not prevent her from being " Américaine jusqu'aux moelles ." Yet: " Elle était très attachée à notre pays qu'elle habitait. Elle le comprenait et le faisait comprendre ." Two things at once, not to be separated: a great lover and interpreter of France, and an American to her marrow. And, above all, " C'était une grande Européenne, citoyenne de l'univers ."[11] NOTES [1] Diary of George Frederic Jones, 1847-48, Lilly. [2] BG, ch. 3, i. [3] BG, ch. 1, i. [4] BG, ch. 1, iii. Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times (Norton, 1987), 126-32. [5] "The Look of Paris," ii, FF. See EW to BB, 30 September 1914, Letters, 341. [6] EW to BB, 12 February 1934, Letters, 574. [7] L&I, 1077. See Ew, introduction to Claude Silve's Benediction , in Wegener, 252. [8] L&I, 1081. [9] BG, ch. 3, iii. EW and her father were both avid Ruskinians--his library had Modern Painters and Seven Lamps , and he gave her Stones of Venice and Mornings in Florence . She calls the latter Walks in Florence in BG. [10] L&I, 1096. [11] Exelsior , 8 April 1916; obituaries, Andre Chaumeix, L'Écho de Paris , 14 August 1937, and Louis Gillet, L'Époque , 16 August 1937. Excerpted from Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Part I | |
1 An American in Paris | p. 3 |
2 Making Up | p. 10 |
3 Pussy Jones | p. 46 |
4 Italian Backgrounds | p. 78 |
5 The Decoration of Houses | p. 120 |
6 The Republic of Letters | p. 159 |
7 Obligations | p. 192 |
8 The Legend | p. 212 |
9 Friends in England | p. 233 |
Part II | |
10 Mme Warthon | p. 265 |
11 L'Ame Close | p. 308 |
12 La Demanderesse | p. 361 |
13 Getting What You Want | p. 402 |
14 Fighting France | p. 444 |
15 Une Seconde Patrie | p. 470 |
Part III | |
16 Pavillon/Chateau | p. 523 |
17 The Age of Innocence | p. 565 |
18 Jazz | p. 606 |
19 A Private Library | p. 668 |
20 All Souls' | p. 717 |
Edith Wharton's Family Tree | p. 763 |
Notes | p. 765 |
Select Bibliography and Abbreviations | p. 829 |
Acknowledgements | p. 837 |
Index | p. 841 |