Customs of her country

Despite her close ties to Europe, Edith Wharton remained a writer focused on America and Americans

April 22, 2007|William H. Pritchard

Edith Wharton
By Hermione Lee
Knopf, 869 pp., illustrated, $35

Here, in this door stopper of a book, is everything you will ever need and want to know about Edith Wharton. Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford, is distinguished for her scrupulosity and range as a biographer -- her 1997 book on Virginia Woolf ranks as one of the very best on a modern writer -- and a critical sensitivity to fiction that finds an echo in the intelligent common reader. The book's length allows her to give ample commentary to Wharton's novels and stories, along with a virtually day-by-day tracing of her extraordinary energies as a traveler, a buyer and designer of houses, a planner and critic of gardens -- of interior and exterior decoration. R.W.B. Lewis's biography of 1975 was notable for its sanity and scholarship; Lee's is about a third longer, makes use of letters Lewis hadn't seen (especially Wharton's correspondence with her lover, Morton Fullerton ), and is more passionate in the determination to establish Wharton as a masterly writer -- someone not to be patronized as the privileged and snobbish embodiment of high-class imperiousness.

Wharton's reading in 19th-century scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists -- Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Thorstein Veblen, James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" -- was, in Lee's phrase, "one of her first and most determined exit strategies" from the stifling parental and New York culture of "provincialism, censoriousness and timidity." She became a "novelist-ethnographer" of the world in which she grew up. Yet like James Joyce, who made oppressive Ireland the subject of his fictions, Wharton, for all her commitment to Europe, especially France, never left home. The 20 years of traveling between her marriage, in 1885, and "The House of Mirth," in 1905 , her second novel, were crucial to her development; but, like that novel, the major ones that followed -- "The Custom of the Country" and "The Age of Innocence" -- were saturated with New York City.