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LETTERS,BIOGRAPHYAND CRITICISM: JAMES, WHARTON ANDATHERTON Joseph Griffin Edwin Sill Fussell. The French Side of Henry James. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1990. xii + 249 pp. Emily Wortis Leider. California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. xviii + 402 pp. Lyall H. Powers, ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters, 1900-1915. New York: Charles Scribners, 1990. xv+ 412 pp. Little or no introduction is needed to two of the writers who are the subjects of the books under consideration here: Henry James and Edith Wharton both, the latter more recently, have acceded to high places among American writers and are not likely to suffer a falling-off. Gertrude Atherton has not enjoyed the high reputation of her celebrated contemporaries and this first biography serves the purpose of acquainting us with this novelist who spent much of her life in the public gaze, but who, since her death in 1948,has been onlya marginal literary figure. Born Gertrude Horn on 30 October 1858 in San Francisco, she married a wealthy Californian, George Atherton, who had been courting her divorced mother. Her attempts to write and publish were bitterly opposed by the socially conscious Atherton family, and it was not until her husband's death when she was thirty and her subsequent move to New York that she launched her career. That career was a long and successful one: her oeuvre amounts to over fifty books, most of them novels, and some of them bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of the attention she received derived from the overt eroticism and forward-looking feminism of novels such as Hennia Saydam (1889) and Black Oxen (1923). Her success and fame made it possible for her to travel a great deal, and though she cannot be considered an expatriate in the same sense as either Wharton or James, she spent much of her life away from the United States, living for extended periods in England and Germany and more briefly in France, the Caribbean and Greece. She also knew, or enjoyed the friendship of, some of the most 480 Joseph Griffin important writers of her time; to mention a few, she knew James and formed friendships with Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten and Ambrose Bierce. Reversing her earlier rejection of California for what she considered its isolation and provincialism, she returned there when she was sixty, somewhat mellowed in comparison to the often irascible, temperamental, sometimes spiteful and cruel person she had been as a younger woman. An anonymous NewRepublicreviewer commented on Atherton's 1917 collection of essays TheLivingPresentin the following terms: "Her book is a curious although intriguing jumble of prejudice, keen swift insight, merciless observation, and a good deal of perhaps unconscious snobbery" (quoted in Leider, 276); probably unwittingly, he or she was assessing the quality of the book's author. In any case, the Atherton who emerges from Leider's detailed biography is all of what the reviewer claims her book to be. The biographer has silhouetted Atherton in all her contradictions and paradoxes against the background of the times and places in which she spent the ninety-one years of her restless and provocative life. In her method, Leider resembles an American biographer of the 1940s and 1950s,Marchette Chute, whose lives of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herrick and Herbert enjoyed considerable popular success.1 Because she was dealing with subjects so distant in time, and about whose personal lives data was less than profuse, Chute evolved a kind of biography in which she "tried to make a rather obscure life-story come clear by lighting up the background vividly enough so that the figures in the foreground would be silhouetted against it."2 To be sure, Atherton presented nowhere near the problem of obscurity that Chute's subjects did; nevertheless, there is a sense in which Leider was forced into the "silhouette" method. As she writes: "[Atherton] certainly did nothing to ease a biographer's task. For all her access to print and publicity, she remained remote and difficult to know. Hungry for fame, attention, approval, she kept her distance from those she knew best. She left no diary, revealed little that was...

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