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. 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. Hermione Lee's Reading Guide to Edith Wharton Hermione Lee, about whose Virginia Woolf the Amazon.com reviewer wrote, "Biographies don't get much better than this," has turned for her next major subject to Edith Wharton. Wharton's classics, including The House of Mirth , The Age of Innocence , and Ethan Frome , are known to many readers, but Lee has prepared exclusively for us a Reading Guide to Edith Wharton that goes beyond those familiar titles to unearth lesser-known gems among her remarkable stories and novels, from the story "After Holbein," "a masterpiece of ghoulish, chilling satire," to The Custom of the Country , her "most ruthless, powerful, and savage novel." Edith Wharton had an unfortunate habit of burning her letters, which makes her an elusive topic for biographers. Critics enthusiastically agreed, however, that Hermione Lee succeeds in bringing Wharton to vibrant life. They were impressed by Lee's scholarship and unwillingness to speculate, as others have done before her, without proof. Instead, Lee teases out the details of Wharton's life by analyzing evidence that scholars often overlook: houses she decorated, travel itineraries, and reading lists. Most reviewers consider Lee, a Professor of English at Oxford, at her best when outlining and exploring Wharton's numerous works. Confidently dispelling myths that Wharton was a prudish spinster who mimicked the style of others, this voluminous biography reveals a fiercely independent woman ahead of her time. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. *Starred Review* Likely to replace R. W. B. Lewis' groundbreaking Edith Wharton (1975) as the definitive biographical treatment, because of new sources (as well as the author's sensitive interpretation of these sources), Lee's tremendous biography of one of the most important American writers rises to landmark status, the same level achieved by her previous Virginia Woolf (1997). Generally thought of as the grand dame of American letters, Edith Wharton grew up and married in New York City high society and subsequently wrote about that milieu. Her popular image as handed down from her generation onward is that of a char