Hermione Lee - Edith Wharton

Praise for Hermione Lee's

EDITH WHARTON

A splendid biography, extremely rich in social and historical detail. Hermione Lee's triumph lies in rendering the dynamism and integrity of this sometimes remote and always willful and stoic woman without leaving out the nuances, the soft exceptions and endearing contradictions.

Edmund White, The New York Review of Books

Hermione Lee has written a fascinating portrait of a brilliant writer.

The Economist

Thorough [and] scholarly. The extraordinary accomplishment of [Lee's] biography enables readers to feel that they have known [Wharton] all their lives.

The Wall Street Journal

Stunning. Wonderfully humanizing, keenly reasoned.

Vogue

Splendid. Lee gives us what appears to be the totality of Wharton's life and works.

Louis Auchincloss, The New York Sun

Definitive. Just as Wharton's writing endures, so will this compelling portrait.

Daily News

Groundbreaking. Lee superbly culls from Wharton's novels, stories, poems, journals, and letters to create a sophisticated, persuasive, and powerfully intelligent masterwork that merges Wharton's public and private sides into a dynamic whole.

Elle

Immense and pleasing. Wharton's life, as Lee smoothly and wittily presents it, reads like one of her novels.

San Francisco Chronicle

Authoritative. Here is everything you will ever need and want toknow about Edith Wharton.

The Boston Globe

Lucid and acute. Lee goes into [her life] with a thoroughness no otherWharton biography has yet achieved.

Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

Richly detailed. Hermione Lee artfully interweaves the fiction andthe life.

Newsweek

Criticism at its best. Lee astutely demonstrates how Wharton trans-formed her obsessions into stories of loss, regret, entrapment, and the woman who pays and pays.

The Nation

Meticulous and authoritative. [Lee's] exhaustive knowledge of Wharton's writing [creates] what deserves to be known as the definitive biography.

The Christian Science Monitor

Magisterial. Incisive. [Lee's] biography will surely be the definitive life of Wharton for some time to come.

Sandra M. Gilbert, American Scholar

Eloquent. Lee is particularly sensitive to the gap between the life aslived and the writer's retrospective creation of herself.

London Review of Books

Excellent. Deals superbly with the many strands of Wharton's life. A magnificent and subtle biography of a magnificent and subtle writer.

The Sunday Telegraph (London)

Edith Wharton could scarcely have failed to be impressed by its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception. This is a glorious biography.

The Independent on Sunday

Monumentally conceived and impressively executed. Comprehensive and insightful. Lee is out to understand Wharton, not to vilifyor sanctify her. Neither Wharton nor the reader should have causefor complaint.

Elaine Showalter, The Guardian (London)

Lee reconstructs Wharton's physical world (notably her houses), her intellectual cultural world, and her social world(s) in ?ne detail. It is done brilliantly. Anyone embarking on a reading of Wharton will deny themselves full appreciation if they do not consult Lee, whose biography is now the necessary accompaniment.

John Sutherland, Financial Times

Lee's subtle and painstaking ability to illuminate the work with the life, and to make the life itself so interesting makes this a superb biography.

Colm Tibn, The Irish Times

Adding impressive depth and nuance to the received portrait of Wharton, Lee's biography excels in its discussion of her writing.

The Sunday Times (London)

Perceptive. In Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton has found a sympa-thetic spirit and a tireless investigator.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Hermione Lee

EDITH WHARTON

Hermione Lee is the first woman Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her books include a major biography of Virginia Woolf; studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, and Philip Roth; and a collection of essays on life-writing, Virginia Woolf 's Nose. Also a well-known critic, Lee served as the Chair of Judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006. She lives in Oxford and Yorkshire.

ALSO BY HERMIONE LEE

The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Elizabeth Bowen
Philip Roth
Willa Cather: Double Lives
Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf 's Nose: Essays on Life-Writing

AS EDITOR

Stevie Smith: A Selection
The Hogarth Letters
The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen
The Secret Self: Short Stories by Women The Short Stories of Willa Cather
Virginia Woolf 's A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf 's To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf 's The Years
Virginia Woolf 's On Being Ill

Edith Wharton's passport photograph, 1927
The details read: Height: 5'5
Hair: Chestnut
Eyes: Brown
Occupation: Author

For
John Barnard

PART I

An American in Paris

I n Paris, in February 1848, a young American couple on their Grand Tour of Europe found themselves, to their surprise, in the middle of a French revolution. Up to then, the travels of George Frederic Jones and his wife of three years, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, with their one-year-old son, Frederic, had been undramatic. They had a lengthy European itinerary, the usual thing for Americans of their class, backed by the substantial funds of the Jones family, one of the leading, old-established New York clans. Starting in England and Paris in April 1847, they had done Brussels, Amsterdam, Hanover, Berlin and Dresden, Prague, Linz, Salzburg and Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Coblenz, Friburg, Geneva, Lake Como and the major Italian cities. George Frederic, at twenty-seven an experienced traveller (his father had taken him on his first European tour when he was seventeen), was able to indulge all his appetites for architecture, scenery, paintings, collectable objects, shopping, theatre, entertainment and seeing life. Lu, though more limited by looking after little Frederic and by her frequent illnesses and her tremendous headaches, was very definite about what she liked and did not like on her first trip abroad: Lu rather disgusted with the Catholic ceremonies.

George Frederic voiced his own prejudices confidently all over Europe. More disgusted than ever with London London prices are fearful Decidedly disgusted with Milan. In Amsterdam, the smell from the canal in most parts of the city fearful Drove to the Jewish synagoage [