Lee, Hermione, 2007. Edith Wharton. London: Chatto & Windus. (ISBN 07011 66657) Price: £25 (hbk). 854 pp.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Anderson (University of Glasgow)
In discussing her latest biography, Edith Wharton (2007), Hermione Lee reports that she used Wharton's life-long passion for the designed, domestic space of house and garden as a structural device (Lee, 2006). Wharton's interest in houses and gardens spills over from her life to her writing; not only did she write a number of non-fiction books on the subject – including The Decoration of Houses (1897) and Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) – but she devoted a great deal of space in her fiction to describing characters' surroundings and frequently used the description of houses to express a character's inner world and temperament or the thematic concerns of a novel. Lee emphasises this point throughout Edith Wharton, and echoes it by structuring the book with chapters as rooms. This frees the book from a strictly chronological format and allows references to significant people, experiences or locations to re-occur. For example, incidents in the chapter devoted to Henry James resurface in the chapters describing Edith Wharton's move to France, her affair with Morton Fullerton and her volunteer work during World War I.
Readers familiar with Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf (first published in 1996) will know what to expect from her most recent endeavour – a detailed literary biography, following the trajectory of the subject's writing life and a close analysis of her works and influences. Edith Wharton is a magnificent accomplishment. It provides a great deal of detail about the life of Edith Wharton and her interests in writing, architecture, gardening, travel, and illuminates her relationships with other public intellectuals such as Walter Berry and Henry James. Lee focuses on Wharton's life in Europe (although she does not neglect Wharton's early life in New York and Massachusetts), both her extensive travels and her ongoing relationship with France. The chapters on Wharton's volunteer work in Paris during World War I are particularly compelling, detailing an aspect of her life that may be unknown to the majority of the readers of her New York novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.
In comparing the opening sentences and chapter titles of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, the reader can observe Lee's shift in style over the last decade. Virginia Woolf opens with a question and direct quotation from Woolf, 'My God, how does one write a biography?' (Lee, 1997, p.3). Edith Wharton opens with a statement packed with historical detail, 'In 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' (p.3). The first chapter of Virginia Woolf is titled 'Biography', emphasising literary form, while the first chapter of Edith Wharton is titled 'An American in Paris', emphasising nationality, location and migration – key themes of the subsequent biography. While Lee certainly gives a great deal of space to analysis of Edith Wharton's writing, she focuses more on the content and context, social, geographic and literary, rather than the form – more important for an understanding of Woolf's experimental modernism than for Wharton's social satires.
Lee devotes the first chapter of Virginia Woolf to an exploration of the theory and challenges of biography and autobiography, engaging with Woolf's thoughts on auto/biography and also discussing her own struggles and hesitations. She begins by citing a variety of openings to previous biographies, highlighting the options open to biographers of Woolf and going on to discuss the illusion of objectivity: 'Positions have been taken, myths have been made' (Lee, 1997, p.3). Turning to Edith Wharton, I find Lee much more comfortable in her position as biographer. She situates both herself as biographer and the theoretical questions of biography in the background and foregrounds the history of her subject's family in the opening chapter. However, she does pick up on the significance of taking a position and the mythmaking potential of biography that she discussed in Virginia Woolf. By beginning with a discussion of Edith Wharton's parents' European travels, Lee indicates that a primary concern of her book will be Wharton's relationship with Europe and the trans-Atlantic tension rooted in Wharton's childhood and played out in her adult life. In the opening chapter Lee highlights Wharton's devotion to France during the First World War, her insistence on breaking away from her parents' world and the importance of these things to her (prolific) writing life. Lee confidently asserts her own version of Wharton (much more clearly than she does in Virginia Woolf), positioning her biography amongst the myths made by previous biographers. 'This then, is the story of an American citizen in France. She was a European on a grand scale who left her old home and made new ones for herself, who was passionately interested in France, England and Italy, but who could never be done with the subject of America and Americans [...] In almost every one of [her books] there is a cultural comparison or conflict, a journey or a displacement, a sharp eye cast across national characteristics' (Lee, 2007, p.8).
As she did so skilfully in Virginia Woolf, Lee frequently allows her subject to speak for herself, quoting extensively from Wharton's letters, books and other records. By using material from a large number of Wharton's companions (family, friends, acquaintances), Lee also shows her subject from myriad angles, giving the reader multiple versions of a complex person. Her meticulous scholarship is impressive – she frequently notes the linguistic connections between Wharton's published writing, letters and private writing, illuminating all three for the reader. However, this wealth of material neither weighs the book down, nor interferes with fluency of reading.
Lee is conservative in her approach to enigmas in Wharton's life. She refuses to fill in gaps in the record with speculations. She will draw conclusions from pieced together evidence but is very conscientious about informing the reader of her sources, or lack of them. For examples, she writes perceptively about the breakdown of Wharton's marriage, but makes very clear the lack of detail in Wharton's papers about the lived experience of her life with Teddy Wharton. She notes the loss of much of Wharton's correspondence, particularly her letters to Walter Berry and Henry James (as well as Berry's and Morton Fullerton's letters to her). While Lee does draw upon Wharton's writings as well as the written reports of her companions to indicate Wharton's frame of mind in given situations, she refuses an overtly psychoanalytic approach.
As in her previous books, Lee focuses a good deal of attention on Wharton's writing life. She describes both Wharton's writing process – her notebooks with plot outlines, character lists and other notes, cut-and-paste manuscripts full of revisions, her habit of writing in bed – and her finished products – novels, short stories, non-fiction. Lee provides insightful analysis of Wharton's books – both her well-known novels and those that have been neglected by contemporary readers. Lee frequently reiterates the point that most of Wharton's fiction cannot be read as autobiographical in terms of plot and character, but that the themes and tones of her books often reveal the psychological preoccupations of the author. Lee interweaves her readings of Wharton's life and fiction most skilfully where the connections are least apparent. For example, in her discussion of The Reef, written after Wharton's affair with Morton Fullerton, Lee draws the reader's attention to what the novel reveals about the passions of the writer. 'The Reef is one of her most autobiographical novels, looking not at all like autobiography. This painful and emotionally intricate novel is a study of, and an exercise in, disguise and evasion. The book behaves like both its central women characters: it is as guarded as Anna Leath and as openly emotional as Sophy Viner [...] In all the writings from these years of passion, sorrow, and disappointment [...] there is a move out towards an imagined place of escape, freedom, and true relationships, and a move backwards, a return or a fixing, in some form of paralysis, thwarting or disillusion' (Lee, 2007, p.351, 357).
Edith Wharton will be a great pleasure and useful resource for scholars and general readers. It is finely written, informative and challenging, highlighting aspects of Wharton's life and work that are often neglected. It is dense and long (the text runs to 756 pages minus notes, bibliography and index), but well worth the investment of time and attention. Lee illuminates a remarkable writer and provides a perceptive and fluent analysis of the social, historical and personal context of Wharton's writing.
Bibliography
Lee, H., 2006 (22 November). Seminar presentation at the University of Glasgow.
Lee, H., 1997. Virginia Woolf. Second edition. London: Vintage.