Back in January 2007 I purchased the above book which I had been eagerly awaiting as Edith Wharton is one of my favourite writers and I admire her enormously. However, I found it very hard going and explained why in my post of February 2007 just why I found it so.
The book was put back on my shelves and there it has sat ever since and I have been looking at it constantly and thinking I really must have Another Go. Well, cometh the hour, cometh the book and for some reason I picked it up last weekend, sat down and just got on with it, dived in head first and took the plunge (sorry for these mixed metaphors) and that was it, totally hooked and immersed and finished yesterday with head reeling at just how wonderful this book is and how my earlier impressions were wrong.
I doubt very much if another biography of Edith Wharton will ever need to be written as I cannot imagine there is anytihng left to say that Hermione Lee has not put down here. The biographical details of Edith's life are probably pretty well known by all Wharton lovers, the doubt that she was her father's daughter, her difficult relationship with a demanding and socially conscious mother, her unhappy marriage to Teddy Wharton (whose father had died in a mental asylum but nobody thought this mattered), his deterioration, then divorce, her life in Paris, her travels, her friendship with Henry James, her passionate love affair with the untrustworthy and shallow Morton Fullerton, her life long friendship with Walter Berry, her war work in Paris duirng World War 1, the awarding of the Legion D'Honneur....well, this is all fascinating and deeply dissected and discussed, but the main reason I found this book so engrossing was the linking and analysis of her writing with her life and her state of mind and location at the time each book was written, all of which have a bearing on the individual novels, short stories and poems.
I cannot write a literary criticism of this biography - I do not have the intellectual capabilities to do so and I can only sit back in admiration at the sheer breadth and scale of this life. I have, however, stuck yellow post its at various places where I have come across something I wanted to mention and I am now going to have a look at them and see if I can remember what I thought at the time and why I marked it. Here goes with just a few:
House of Mirth - Hermione Lee points out that the plot revolves around paper - letters, notes, bills, telegrams, newspaper scandal sheets, a will (by which Lily is disinherited) and a cheque. Lily pays her way by helping Judy Trenor 'with the chaos of letters, bills and other domestic documents', during her last farewell scene with Selden she burns the packet of love letters he wrote to his ex-mistress. She spends her last hours at her desk sorting her papers and writing and her last act before she takes the dose of chloral which kills her is to write a cheque.
Pretty obvious when HL points this out, but not noticed by me when reading.
Edith Wharton and Henry James - their friendship endured though there were times when it was strained and Edith used to be irritated and the constant reference to her work being 'Jamesian' but in spite of his frequent exasperation, he wrote this to her: "I cling to you dearest Edith through thick and thin and believe that we shall find ourselves in some secure port together. The great thing is that we shall always tumble together, more and more never apart and for that we may trust ourselves and each other to the end of time".
I find these words very moving and EW kept them and copied these words into her memoir many years later.
Teddy on Edith - seemed to be an ordinary, perfectly nice chap though this changed when his mental state became precarious. Their marriage a total mismatch of course and yet in a letter he writes about her with great affection and a knowledge of his own literary shortcomings: " She has suffered a lot with an abscess and the grippe and is much pulled down. I shall motor her off to the South as soon as she is well enough. You know I am no good on Puss's (his pet name for her) high plane of thought, but you will agree that no lady of talent is as well turned out as she is, but she is a wonderful person..."
Edith Wharton's standing as a novelist waned as she grew older and she was regarded as old fashioned and a writer of old fashioned stories, completely missing the fact that her eagle eye for hypocrisy and the social scene was as sharp as ever. However, this seems to be the fate of all novelists (same thing happened to L M Montgomery as I discovered in the recent biography I read of this wonderful writer). Fashions come and go and eventually authors are taken out of the cupboard, dusted down and their reputations looked at once more in the light of modern thinking and they are restored to the Pantheon of Greatness once more. Edith Wharton is now firmly back where she belongs and the fact that two hugely successful films, The Age of Innocence and House of Mirth, were made in the 1990s certainly had a great deal to do with raising awareness of this magnificent writer. I always find it rather galling when one has loved an author even though they were not popular and I become annoyed that others talk about her as if they, personally, had just discovered her and I feel like shouting Well I always read her even before Daniel Day Lewis came along, but that is pure silliness on my part.
Edith had practically no family left by the time she died, her family ties had always been tenuous and she surrounded herself with her family of friends and though she could be imperious and haughty with outsiders, within this small circle she was loyal, loving and devoted. She was buried in France, where she lived most of her life, and the book ends on a rather melancholy note with Hermione Lee visiting her grave in Versailles.
There she finds it, rather plain and rather ugly and the tomb covered in weeds and broken bottles, nobody had obviously been there for some time. "It struck me as an unvisited and lonely tomb of a person who died without close relatives nearby to look after it.....this neglect seemed sad. In the rain I weeded Edith, and planted a single white silk azalea, bought from the flower shop at the cemetery gate. She would probably have been scornful about the artificial flower, but would, I felt, have been glad to have her grave tidied up".
