The Wharton School

In 1929 Janet Flanner (a k a Genêt), fledgling Paris correspondent for the fledgling New Yorker, wrote under her own byline for the first time. Her profile of Edith Wharton, she knew, had caught both Mrs. Wharton's personality and the ambivalence it inspired in the brasher, far more experimental writers of the 1920s. A chilly bluestocking and a perpetual outsider, whether in the city of her birth, New York, or her adopted homeland, France, Wharton was the mother of them all, beloved and hated. Her long career included a Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence (1921), a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (she was the first woman to receive it) and a string of bestsellers because, as Flanner tartly observed, in lambasting society's sins, "Mrs. Wharton gave the great public what it wanted." Wharton was, in other words, a middle-brow satirist who, wearing pearls and décolletage in her stock publicity photograph, "dressed for her public as for a ball."

On the cover of Hermione Lee's exhaustive new biography, the fortysomething Wharton, draped in furs, stands in front of a large shadowy picture and glances wistfully to her left, reddish hair decorously swept up into a large, fashionable hat. Decidedly affluent, Wharton also seems youthfully vulnerable and, in a sense, trapped by her flush costume. For Lee, the Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and author of a superb biography of Virginia Woolf, intends to make the writer human, real and engaging.

Determined not to present Wharton as the pale, predestined or passionless victim of her well-heeled class and kind, Lee admiringly writes at the outset of her book that "with prolonged, hard-working, deliberate ambition, she pushed out and away from her family's mental habits, social rules and ways of life...to construct her own personal and professional revolution." That is, almost eighty years after Flanner's profile appeared (which Lee in passing calls "malicious"), Mrs. Wharton comes before the public yet again, this time as a tough and first-rate writer of "compassionate realism" and as, once again, a perpetual expatriate, dignified, aloof in public and preternaturally energetic, a devoted friend and complicated, contradictory woman.

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