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Edith Wharton |
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Hermione Lee, the author of "Virginia Woolf", brings us the biography of Edith Warton by interweaving the classic American fiction writer's life with the evolution of her writing.
Alfred A. Knopf, 880 pages
04/10/2007
$35.00
ISBN: 0375400044
Nonfiction
Biographies & Memoirs
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Brad Hooper
Likely to replace R.W.B. Lewis' groundbreaking Edith Wharton (1975) as the definitive biographical treatment, because of new sources (as well as the author's sensitive interpretation of these sources), Lee's tremendous biography of one of the most important American writers rises to landmark status. [15 Feb 2007, p.31]
Publishers Weekly
One might think that R.W.B. Lewis's excellent 1975 biography had precluded the need for another book about Edith Wharton. Not so. Reading Lee's superb new biography is akin to comparing a fine watercolor sketch to a vivid masterpiece. [29 Jan 2007, p.55]
Kirkus Reviews
An exemplary biography of a not-always-exemplary subject. Sure to be the standard work on Wharton for years to come.
New York Review Of Books Edmund White
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.
The New York Times Book Review Claire Messud
Nobody has done Edith Wharton such careful justice as Lee, who has brilliantly illuminated so many of the rooms in Wharton's vast interior house. But perhaps precisely because these rooms are so fully furnished and their trappings so well rendered, it is at times difficult to see clearly, or indeed fully to embrace, the lonely innermost soul herself. Such detachment is undoubtedly the biographer's job; but it also reflects, as Wharton unflinchingly believed, what life is like.
Washington Post Diane Johnson
This meticulous, generous biography is likely to suffice for a long time. The virtue of such a compendious work from a distinguished biographer is that one can at last grasp the full range of Wharton's writing and the full power of her energy.
Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore
Lee is particularly masterful in her discussion of Wharton's fiction. Many biographies of novelists sink under the leaden weight of resumé; but Lee's outlines of the plots are fused with illuminating interpretation. A magnificent and subtle biography of a magnificent and subtle writer.
The Economist
A fascinating portrait of a brilliant writer.
The Observer Hilary Spurling
This is a majestically weighty biography as meticulous, exhaustive and exhausting in scope and scale as its subject. In the end, the reader can only say of Lee's book what an admirer said of Wharton herself: 'One must give her rope because she is a full-rigged vessel and can't manoeuvre in a toilet basin.'
The Independent Mark Bostridge
Lee's book might well have disappointed Edith Wharton on one count: its excessive length. She would have thought it, in the architectural terms in which she often spoke about her novels, too "loosely built". But she could scarcely have failed to be impressed by its other qualities, its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception. This is a glorious biography.
The Independent Christopher Bigsby
The Wharton who emerges is a writer whose work is so much more varied and powerful than for decades it was presumed to be - and Lee's analysis of these works is compelling.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Michael Gorra
Hermione Lee writes with a poise that allows her to record Edith Wharton’s many acts of personal generosity while also detailing her limitations, the “unappealing” racism and anti-Semitism of her class among them. It is not her biographer’s fault that some readers, myself among them, will finish this book liking Wharton the woman rather less than before.
London Review Of Books Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Hermione Lee has faithfully travelled with Wharton on her many voyages, but I can’t help wondering if she was not sometimes tempted to jump ship.
Sydney Morning Herald Stephanie Bishop
Countering the myth of Wharton as a prudish novelist of manners - a lesser Henry James - Lee's impressive biography shows Wharton as a forceful intellectual in her own right. A writer who, far from identifying with the society she wrote about, sought eagerly to write against her origins.
Daily Telegraph Kasia Boddy
One of this book's great pleasures is Lee's discussion of Wharton's work (in particular, "The Age of Innocence"), and not only as a reflection of her life.
The New Yorker John Updike
Something slightly heavy and lustreless weighs on the big pages as Lee inventories the many members of Wharton’s extensive acquaintance and tracks her avid travels through the American Northeast and Europe and North Africa; each page begins to loom as a cliff that the reader must scale upside down, top to bottom.
Wall Street Journal Barbara Amiel
Heaven knows how many white hairs it cost Hermione Lee, but the extraordinary accomplishment of her biography enables readers to feel that they have known Mrs. W all their lives and -- for better or worse -- with the same sort of intimacy that her closest friends enjoyed.
San Francisco Chronicle Bob Blaisdell
Wharton's life, as Lee smoothly and wittily presents it, reads like one of her novels. She becomes for us the opposite of one of her alluring, aimless and society-bound heroines, such as Lily Bart or Madame Olenska. Instead, Lee paints her as one of the lively, smart, disruptive and independent older women from Wharton's famous novels, the kind who take a liking to and lend a hand to the flailing heroines.
Boston Globe William H. Pritchard
Lee describes everything most fully, names the names and species of every dog Wharton ever owned, every bit of food and drink consumed, and the names and prices of each ordered bottle of wine. If, as she says, Wharton was a "fussy and ruthless tourist," there is something ruthless (if not fussy) in the endless catalog ing Lee feels she must engage in.
Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
Lee, in her resurrecting ardor, resurrects every last button and shoelace. There are pages upon pages describing Wharton's houses, gardens, reading lists, itineraries. A half-page goes to one of her wine cellars. A biography should create the appetite that its details feed; Lee stuffs her reader like a Strasbourg goose. Sometimes, though, she goes into a sublime overdrive, never more than in a portrait of Wharton and James that has never been bettered.
The Spectator Ferdinand Mount
In the last 300 pages we begin to wish for a little winnowing, for example, of the pages Lee uses up describing houses that Edith might have bought or rented but did not and repeating the plot of a story she might have written but didn't.
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