| An example of this cycle of reading about adultery, committing adultery, then writing about adultery exists in the life and work of Edith Wharton. Wharton, whose marriage to her husband, Teddy, was a sexual disaster, began an adulterous relationship in her mid-forties with W. Morton Fullerton, an American journalist and intimate friend of Henry James. It was her first passionate love affair. This relationship, though it lasted a short time, taught Wharton much of what she had always wanted to know about the human heart and about the body's capacity for ecstasy and the soul's potential for despair. |
| Before she met Fullerton, according to one of her biographers, R. W. B. Lewis, the image of "a dreamridden woman trapped in an unhappy marriage" in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary had captured Wharton's imagination. So too had the unconventional and passionate sex life of the writer George Sand, especially as it had been described in her Histoire de ma vie. Wharton made a pilgrimage to Sand's country house, Nohant, during a motor tour of France. In seeing the place where Sand had lived, where Sand had loved, Wharton believed that she might capture something of Sand's free-spirited nature. Her behavior with Fullerton was, in part, patterned upon that of Sand, though Wharton herself could never manage Sand's emotional insouciance. (Years later, though, Fullerton described her as an uninhibited erotic sister |
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