The Fascinating Life of Edith Wharton
When in 1921 Edith Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence, she was 59 years old, permanently settled in France, and almost a legend in the United States. Her best-known works, The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome among them, had been critically acclaimed bestsellers, and they have since become enduring classics of American literature. Her life has fascinated generations as well, and several biographers have attempted to reveal the famously private author in all her complexities. She was an American woman who broke new ground as a writer, an expatriate who ended her life in France but never lost her essential American-ness. The latest biography, titled simply Edith Wharton (Knopf, 880 pages, $35), is a long-awaited, richly detailed work by Hermione Lee, a British author best known for her biography of Virginia Woolf.
Until now the definitive Wharton biography was R. W. B. Lewis’s 1975 Pulitzer winner, an absorbing and revealing book. Lewis wrote with elegance and restraint; Lee musses things up a bit. Her book, written more than 30 years later and therefore privy to newer research, is more than 200 pages longer, and it brims with details and observations that devotees of Wharton’s work and lovers of literary biography will relish.
Lee’s subject is a fascinating one by any standards. Edith Newbold Jones was born during the Civil War to a pedigreed New York family said to have inspired the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.” The experience of growing up in that tribe, a sort of American version of royalty, inspired The Age of Innocence and many of her other novels and short stories. Another childhood experience was just as formative: Money troubles brought on by the war prompted her father, a diffident, bookish man, to take the family to Europe for six years starting when Edith was four, with extended residences in Rome and Paris. Playing among Roman ruins sparked the girl’s imagination, and she credited her early exposure to “that background of beauty and old established order” with instilling in her a lifelong love of travel.
One adventure in particular sparked her “passion for the road”: Her father insisted on seeing the Alhambra, in Spain, even though in the 1860s the trip was a dangerous proposition, over rough roads and through wild terrain. All her life Wharton would make ambitious motor trips in the spirit of that early jaunt. She also would remember pacing about her father’s library, clutching his copy of Washington Irving’s Alhambra, when she couldn’t even read yet but was already obsessed with the idea of telling stories. Travel and writing were twin passions for her, and they were often intertwined.
She didn’t enjoy returning to America, in 1872, but the family spent another year abroad when she was 19, and her father died while they were in Cannes. Wharton spent her adult life distancing herself from the constrained world of “old New York” and devoted much of her career to satirizing it. But she also enjoyed the privileges afforded by her social connections there, which opened doors for her all her life, leading her to people like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry James.
Lee spins this kind of fundamental contradiction into great biography. Wharton was wealthy by the standards of her time, but she also needed her writing income and was a savvy businesswoman. She was dignified and cerebral on the surface, but roiling underneath was a sensual, passionate woman who longed for physical and emotional abandon. Her one shot at a love affair (with Morton Fullerton, another American living in Paris) happened when she was 46 years old and still in her crumbling marriage (she divorced Teddy Wharton several years later). The affair rocked the foundation of her neatly organized being. “I have drunk the wine of life at last,” she wrote.
As for her famously disastrous marriage with Wharton, by all accounts their main point of reference as a couple was their love of dogs and motorcars. But Teddy came from Edith’s world, and before his descent into mental illness, which precipitated their divorce, he was a genial if unintellectual companion who relished traveling with her and her friends. Lee explores Edith Wharton’s own depression and illness (thought to be brought on by her unhappy marriage) as well as her periods of almost manic productivity. And she gives new life to her intensely managed domesticity, so vividly expressed in her brilliantly designed gardens and legendary houses. Her first published work was The Decoration of Houses, cowritten with Ogden Codman, and it has just been reissued by Rizzoli. Her gardening skills were equally celebrated. She approached garden design as a scholar would, traveling the world to study examples, writing about them, and pouring that knowledge and skill into her own landscapes.
If Lewis’s biography is as tidy and well-ordered as the New York brownstones Wharton loathed, then Lee’s version unfolds more organically. Its structure is episodic, with a chapter devoted to each of the major periods of Wharton’s life, in loose chronological fashion. There is also a section for each of her major books, along with searching critical readings of The Custom of the Country, which Lee considers her best, and many short stories; a chapter about her deeply formative Italian travels; one describing the design and execution of the Mount, her estate in Lenox, Massachusetts; and several chapters devoted to people close to her, including Henry James, who became a friend and mentor, and Walter Berry, an American bon vivant she once called the most important person in her life.
However, it is Wharton’s love of France, her “seconde patrie,” that becomes the heart of the biography. Lee brings to life Wharton’s Paris years (she began her expatriation in 1906 and died in France in 1937) and her gradual, deep absorption into French ways of living and being. Lee writes vividly of the two French houses Wharton bought, one outside of Paris and one on the Riviera, between which she divided her time in her later years. She spoke the language flawlessly and held a profound respect for the country and its natives. When World War I shattered her Paris idyll, she showed her loyalty by founding several charities, including the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, a cure program for soldiers with tuberculosis, a workroom for seamstresses, and American Hostels for Refugees, which housed and assisted the French and Belgian exiles flooding into Paris. Lee doesn’t make a martyr of Wharton for her sacrifices, though. She makes it clear that her wealth and connections made them all possible.
Indeed, altogether Lee doesn’t make apologies for or romanticize her subject. Wharton was not always a likeable woman, and even her closest friends found her maddening at times. She was famous for being chilly with strangers, dismissive of those she had no use for, and endlessly demanding of friends. She held mildly racist views (anti-Semitism creeps into her writing, as in the character of Simon Rosedale, the unsavory money-making Jew in The House of Mirth). On a trip to Morocco with dignitaries from the French government, she wrote approvingly of the benefits of colonial rule and made paternalistic assumptions about North Africans needing guidance from France in order to develop as a society, while at the same time marveling at their primitive exoticism. Of course, such sentiments were not uncommon at the time, but as her biographer Lewis wrote, “She entertained prejudices that, however one explains them by reference to her background and to the times, one can only find regrettable. She was too large a person, one feels, for these clichés of bigotry.”
Finally, it is Wharton’s largeness, her voracious appetite for life, travel, books, culture, and good talk, that will stay with the reader.