Tom’s Two Cents : Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee

Once in a while I discover a really great biographer, and since biography is one of my favorite genres and literature was one of my majors in college, I'm always gratified to find a true literary biographer.  Hermione Lee is one, for sure.  A professor of English Lit at Oxford, she recently won the Man Booker Prize for Biography (the British equivalent of the Pulitzer) for her bio of British writer Penelope Fitzgerald, and that one is only her latest.  Previous sorties into the lives and works of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Philip Roth have also been received with acclaim.  The one I just finished on Wharton proved to be immensely satisfying and rewarding on a number of levels.

Edith Wharton is not an author whose name runs glibly off the popular tongue.  She is a throwback to another time and another age, the latter being the so-called Gilded Age of old New York society:  her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Age of Innocence," published in 1920 and made into a brilliant film by Martin Scorcese about twenty years ago, is a case in point.  Other of her novels (she was also prolific in the short story form) include "The House of Mirth," "The Custom of the Country," and the grim New England masterwork that shows a very different side of her talent, "Ethan Frome."  But always front and center in her work is the abiding ( and often suffocating) influence of society upon the individuals it produces.  The enduring theme of her work seems to say, "Defy society's conventions and be damned, or at the very least be denied some elementary part of yourself."

 

Edith Wharton was herself a product of the very society she often condemned.   Born into a wealthy, aristocratic family in upper New York State, she was the only girl of a father who died young and a mother who tried to mould her into a figure she relentlessly refused to fit into.  Married at an early age to an older man she had nothing in common with but wealth and respectability, she spent most of her life seeking intellectual and cultural outlets from other gentlemen, including the now not-so-famous American ex-patriate author, Henry James.  In her own day she was as noted for her extensive travel as her writing--at a time when automobiles were still quite new, she drove all over the Continent, especially France and Italy, with an entourage of men, servants and dogs--and of course a chauffeur!  Finally she settled in France, where during WWI she threw herself into the French war effort,  establishing homes and hospitals for orphaned children and tubercular patients.  After the War she was awarded the French Prix de Guerre for her service to the nation.

It's a long book, but a very worthwhile one, about a woman who seemed to have it all, but most assuredly did not.  Yet she rose above her personal life issues to create an enduring body of literary work, virtually the first American woman outside of Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather to do so.