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A rich and powerful new lease of life of the fantastic novelist. It overturns the accepted view, displaying her as a tough, erotically brave, startlingly modern writer.
The name Edith Wharton conjures up Gilded Age NY 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 an 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 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 exceptional 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 separate 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 knowledge of the longing and struggle in women’s lives.
In this masterly new biography, Hermione Lee shifts the emphasis to Europe, inserting Wharton in her social context and history. It shows in fascinating detail how she worked and what lies in the centre of her magnificent books.
