Edith Wharton Seen in Full

In the centenary year of her birth, 1962, Irving Howe edited a collection of critical essays from the first half of the twentieth century attempting to do "Justice to Edith Wharton" (the title of Edmund Wilson's tribute published in 1941 and reprinted in Howe's volume). Only two of the twelve contributors, Q. D. Leavis and Diana Trilling, were women. As Hermione Lee reflects in her splendid new biography, "Wharton's posthumous life at this time was very much a male preserve," just as it had been since the time of her death in 1937. There is much to admire in Howe's collection; but one is also struck now by the condescending attitude of most of the commentators. For Alfred Kazin, Wharton is too much in thrall to her New York upper-class background; for Leavis, Wharton was "unfortunate in her environment" and thus incapable of providing more than "negative" analyses; for Lionel Trilling, her work exudes moral "inertia" (of the kind, Trilling implies, that led to acceptance of the German concentration camps). Even Howe, the editor, speaks of Wharton's "limited scope" and outmoded "technique." He describes The Age of Innocence as "Mrs. Wharton's masterpiece," not as a masterpiece pure and simple. When, by the late 1960s, it was felt that Wharton deserved to have a full-scale biography, one that would draw on private papers embargoed until then, among the men asked to perform this task were Kazin and Wilson. (In his essay Wilson asserted, in an incredible conjecture, that women writers such as Wharton, energized after an emotional crisis with "something like genius," have a relatively brief period of creative excellence. On the other hand male writers, such as Henry James, enjoy staying power until the end.) The man chosen was R. W. B. Lewis, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning biography (1975) has been deemed, even by reviewers of the new Lee volume, the definitive life.

In the new biography Lee notes that she has drawn on letters that were unknown to Lewis. But, more important, she writes with deeper insight and greater sympathy than her predecessor. Lewis could speak for the first time of Wharton's passionate love affair with Morton Fullerton; but his respect for the novels is admiring but limited. Wharton's best works, for him, are near masterpieces. Turning to such lesser-known works as The Children (1928), a late novel about parental neglect and sexual confusion that Lee calls "daring and profoundly sad," Lewis finds it "witty, touching, and eminently readable." For Lewis, Wharton lacks "the visionary dedication to art, and the life of art, of a James Joyce or a Henry James. Her attitude was more modest." Lee makes stronger claims for Wharton, and she does so by showing in rich detail the variety and brilliance of her author's literary achievement. She has tracked Wharton's life and read all her writings with exemplary care; and she demonstrates that in terms of scope and technique Wharton is a modern master. Yes, she was influenced by James, Lee admits; but Lee indicates instances when "she might have influenced him." Novels such as The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence guarantee Wharton's place among the great Western authors. But Lee shows Wharton's considerable importance as well as a writer on Italy and France, as an expert on home design and on gardening, and as a key figure in the New York world of the late nineteenth century and the English and French worlds of the first third of the twentieth century.

When she died in France, one French paper announced "la mort d'Edith Wharton, le dernier écrivain Victorien." But, while half her life was spent in the nineteenth century, the second and more interesting half was spent in the twentieth. Her first thirty-eight years were sidetracked by illness and family problems: an unhappy mother-daughter relationship and an increasingly unfortunate marriage that lasted twenty-eight years. But this was also the period of Wharton's...