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Pursuit of Love
The life and art of Edith Wharton.
by Brooke Allen
6/15/2007, Volume 012, Issue 39
Edith Wharton
A Biography
by Hermione Lee
Knopf, 880 pp., $35
There is a huge cachet involved in writing an acknowledged "definitive" biography of a major figure. Leon Edel's Henry James, Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Edgar Johnson's Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph: These books, never trumped, have made it into every library and must be taken into account by everyone who aspires to write on their subjects. R.W.B. Lewis's masterly Edith Wharton (1975) has been one such definitive work for over 30 years, the indispensable source for everyone interested in that great novelist and great character. Now Hermione Lee, a decade after her major biography of Virginia Woolf, has made a bid to topple Lewis. She has backed up her assault with every weapon in the biographer's armory: detail, comprehensiveness, new sources, sophisticated literary analysis, and empathy. Finally, she bludgeons the competition with sheer bulk: Edith Wharton is a whopping 880 pages, 288 pages longer than Lewis's book.
Has she dislodged her predecessor? Yes, triumphantly. Wharton's own story, as related by Lee, is as compulsively readable and as coherent in all its parts as Wharton's best novels: The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome, and The Custom of the Country. Writers' biographies do not always shed much light on their work, but Wharton's does, for her finest fiction reflects the patterns of her own life and those of the upper-class American world she came from--a society for which she felt a volatile mixture of rage, contempt, pity, and affection. Far from being ...
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