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Knopf
April 2007
On Sale: April 10, 2007
880 pages
ISBN: 0375400044
EAN: 9780375400049
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The definitive biography of one of America’s greatest
writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece
Virginia Woolf. Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does
away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives
us a new Edith Wharton—tough, startlingly modern, as
brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the
well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and
eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings,
she developed a forceful literary professionalism and
thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard
Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who
here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton’s life was
fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses
and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War,
the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of
absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and
childless, her one brush with passion came and went in
midlife, an affair vividly, intimately recounted here. With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly
interweaves Wharton’s life with the evolution of her
writing, the full scope of which shows her far to be more
daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the
Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the
writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
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