Edith Wharton

English

ISBN: 0375400044

EAN: 9780375400049

Category: Biography & Autobiography / Literary/Literary Criticism / American / General/Social Science / Women's Studies/History / Europe / France/

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Release Date: 04/10/2007

Synopsis: The definitive biography of one of Americas greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpieceVirginia Woolf. Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Whartontough, 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. Whartons 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 Whartons 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 Whartonis a landmark biography.

Awards: Ambassador Book Awards – null  Ambassador Book Awards – null  Ambassador Book Awards – null  Ambassador Book Awards – null 

Excerpt: Unknown Property Excerpt

Edith Wharton

Illustrated: Yes

Format: Hardcover

Height: 2.09 inches

Width: 6.64 inches

Length: 9.52 inches

Weight: 45.79 oz

Pages: 880