Wharton Letters

Dear Edith Wharton scholars and librarians

I thought it a good idea to draw your attention to three letters sent by Wharton to John [Hughes Smith] that are up for auction on Thursday 21st June. The catalogue and relevant information is available from the auction room website and the hyperlinks below.

If you would like further information please contact me at this email address or at the phone number below.

Best wishes

Chris Albury <chris@dominicwinter.co.uk>
Auctioneer & Valuer
(Autographs, Documents, Photographs, Ephemera)
Dominic Winter Book Auctions
Mallard House, Broadway Lane, South Cerney, Nr Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 5UQ

HYPERLINK "http://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/"http://www.dominicwinter.co.uk

Children's & Illustrated Books
Modern First Editons, Private Press & Original Artwork
Thursday 21 June commencing at 11am
Viewing Tuesday 19 & Wednesday 20 June 10am-7pm and morning of sale
HYPERLINK "http://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/catcal/S214/index.html"View Catalogue : HYPERLINK "http://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/illustrations/ill214.html"Images

22 *
Wharton (Edith, 1862-1937). Autograph letter signed 'E. Wharton', 53 rue de Varenne, [Paris], 31st December 1910, To John, wishing him best wishes for the New Year, and the Newcastle, if he goes, 'When you wrote me that you were sending a book of Ballads which was "improper reading", my spirits rose, & I fell upon it with avidity. But on perusing L's preface I learned to my dismay that he had personally seen to it that not a line or syllable of the original subsided "which boy & maid may not read". As I fall under neither of these categories, I felt that he need not have taken so [?] trouble in my behalf; but when (at his request) I turned to the "bracketed" lines in Glasgerion & Young Hunting, & saw that "He kissed her in the red fire-light" had been substituted for language of which I dare not even think (judging from the context), I realised how thoughtful you had been in selecting for me this expurgated edition of the songs of our rude ancestors. I trouble to think what I have escaped, when such indelicate allusions are still left & though I shall always value your kindness in sending me the book, I trust you will not expect me to leave on the drawing-room table a work in which such distressing instances of female weakness are celebrated with all the fallacious charms of art. It would certainly do you no good at Newcastle if it were known that you were in the habit of sending to ladies poems in which kissing in the red fire-light is regarded as a comparatively innocent pursuit!', then asking for a letter with news and concluding if there is any chance of his going down to Rome en-route for Newcastle, 4 pp., 8vo
(1)
HYPERLINK "http://www.dominicwinter.co.uk/illustrations/il3708.html"Illustrations Available
£400-600

23 *
Wharton (Edith, 1862-1937). Autograph letter initialled, 53 rue de Varenne, [Paris], 20th November, no year, To John, thanking him for Max, 'It's the most precious thing I've seen for a long time. I sent you Michelangelo & again racked my tired and muddled head for the name of the other book. Do put it on a postcard I'm as ashamed of being so ineffectual as if I did it on purpose!' noting that Teddy is still in London and has written to Miss Bahlumann (?) & my maid that he never intended to return, 'as I have put him in too "humiliating a position"!!', then declaring that she may find herself 'bolting over to London & making the irrevocable and un-Nietzschean gesture', with a postscript saying that he must come over and see the incomparable Habit Vert and that she thinks A. C. Benson is almost the best of Max, 'the feud is wonderful', final blank a little soiled, 3 pp., 8vo
(1)

£250-350

24 *
Wharton (Edith, 1862-1937). Autograph letter initialled, 53 rue de Varenne, [Paris], 5th February 1914, To John, apologising for not writing sooner since her return from America, but that she has been exhausted and though the trip was interesting and rewarding she was left in a state of 'exhaustion & dactylophobia from which I am just recovering', thanking him for his last two letters, telling that she did know of "The Custom" which she knows 'immensely better than the H of M, but most people won't see it because anglo saxons hate irony and can't get on without "heart-interest", suggesting that if he is inclined, he should take a motor trip with her through Algeria and Tunisia and that there is no one more than him that she would rather have as a compagnon de voyage and hoping that she can get Percy too, suggesting that they should not start later than the 10th March as it gets rather hot on the edge of the desert, 4 pp., 8vo
(1)

£300-500

Review of the Lee biography in the International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/26/arts/IDLEDE28.php

Lighting up rooms in Edith Wharton's vast house

By Claire Messud Published: April 27, 2007

Edith Wharton By Hermione Lee 869 pages, Alfred A. Knopf; £25, Chatto and Windus.

In her short story "The Fullness of Life," Edith Wharton wrote that a woman's life is like "a great house full of rooms," most of which remain unseen: "and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes." In spite of the many books written about Wharton and her work - including R. W. B. Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1975 biography - it is Hermione Lee's determination to provide an unprecedented tour of all the rooms in Edith Wharton's mansion. The text is unquestionably authoritative, impressively - indeed, almost alarmingly - exhaustive (it includes lists of Wharton's neighbors, of fellow hotel guests, of the ads surrounding her published stories, of the wines in her cellars); and it seeks, with meticulous care, to approach the soul in her innermost sanctum.

This is a daunting undertaking: Edith Wharton was formidable, multifaceted, guarded and phenomenally busy. Between 1897 and 1937, the year of her death, she published at least one book a year. Altogether she wrote 48. Her posthumous reputation has suffered somewhat in comparison with that of her friend Henry James (as Lee points out, "to this day it is still rare for a book or an essay or a talk on Wharton not to mention James," though "this has not worked the other way"), but Wharton is a literary master - or mistress - in her own right. While only a handful of her books are still widely read, her finest fictions - including "The House of Mirth," "The Custom of the Country," "Ethan Frome" and "The Age of Innocence" - remain as affecting and engrossing today as when they first appeared (when many of them were best sellers), unsentimental illuminations of America in a time of social transition and rich explorations of the unspoken human heart. Moreover, as Lee's biography makes clear, Wharton was also significant as a designer, decorator, gardener, traveler and philanthropist, making her prolific literary production but a part of her life's work.

Edith Newbold Jones was born in New York City on Jan. 24, 1862, into considerable prosperity: "If the Joneses were not Astors or Vanderbilts," writes Lee, "they gave off a pretty well-upholstered air." Raised partly in Europe, like Henry James, she had two older brothers and a difficult mother. Her father, of whom she was immensely fond, died when Wharton was only 20. In her late teens she wrote a novel and published poems (including in The Atlantic Monthly), but she would not fulfill her literary promise until her middle years. At the age of 23, she married Teddy Wharton, an apparently solid if conventional man 12 years her senior, and embarked upon the life expected of a young woman of her station, settling near her mother in fashionable Newport, Rhode Island. While superficially comfortable, it was a time of constraint and depression. A move to Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, entailed the design and construction of Wharton's famous house there, the Mount, which is now open to visitors, and to which a substantial portion of her library has recently been returned.

Following on the heels of her influential first book, "The Decoration of Houses" (1897), which she wrote with a friend, the architect Ogden Codman, the move coincided more or less with the publication of her first novel, "The Valley of Decision" (1902), and with her nonfiction book "Italian Villas and Their Gardens" (1904).

At about the age of 40, Edith Wharton at last came to life - at least professionally. The novel that made her name, "The House of Mirth," published in 1905, is the searing account of the struggles and spiraling descent of Lily Bart, a young woman whose youth is slipping away, and with it her prospects. As Lee observes, "she is always losing her opportunities, because she cannot quite turn herself into a commodity." Lily's failures reflect the importance of money, and self-marketing, for women in late-19th-century American society, and Wharton's assessment is brutal. The book was scandalous, and popular: it sold 30,000 copies in the first three weeks after its publication, and 140,000 in its first year.

In the wake of this success, Wharton became, in every sense, a grande dame, who could no longer complain that she was a failure in Boston because she was "too fashionable to be intelligent" and in New York because she was "too intelligent to be fashionable." In spite of this literary blossoming, and although she was bolstered by close male friends like Henry James and the aristocratic international lawyer Walter Berry (to whom she was so close, for so many years, that many wrongly assumed they were lovers), Wharton struggled with the isolation of an unsatisfying marriage, and with Teddy's increasingly erratic behavior. In 1906, the Whartons settled in Paris; and soon thereafter, through Henry James, she met the louche American journalist Morton Fullerton, with whom she had her life's one truly passionate love affair. Dashing and attractive, he was not a reliable choice: "When Morton Fullerton met Edith Wharton in 1907, he had a potentially scandalous homosexual past, a French wife whom he had divorced with startling rapidity, a blackmailing mistress in whose house he was still living (for convenience, not as a lover), and a frustrated career" - and that was just for starters. R. W. B. Lewis first revealed the details of this affair, but Lee provides a fuller picture of their intimacy, and of Wharton's moving vulnerability in the relationship. [more at the link above]

Review of the Lee biography from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Lee, a Brit who previously wrote 900 pages about Virginia Woolf, is a traditional biographer who seldom rises above the mountain of minutiae culled from letters, diaries and library collections.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07112/779443-148.stm

She leaves the psychoanalysis to others, preferring to investigate her subject's pets, furs, paintings, friendships and incessant trips to Italy.

There are serious attempts to interpret Wharton's writings, but in Lee's approach, the works come across as just another activity like designing a garden. I never got the sense of what Wharton's writing process was amid the clutter of her overstuffed rooms.

As for her subject's views on society, including Jews and blacks, Lee confines her comments to a few pages among the 762, preferring to prepare a kind of Sotheby's catalog instead of Wharton's possessions. She also assumes that her readers know French, an assumption that can further slow the nearly funereal pace.

Sadly, after reading Hermione Lee's treatment of Edith Wharton, I will need some time before the memory of her dullness passes and I can read the novelist with anticipation again.

Review of the Lee biography

From the Washington Times

The Real Edith Wharton

April 22, 2007

---

She is, according to many estimates, America's finest female writer. (Ardent admirers of Willa Cather may disagree.) In other estimates,she looms as a frosty grande dame whose elegant fictions feature socialites and social climbers engaged in well-mannered mortal combat.
The real Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was, to be sure, born in New York City into a well-to-do family that knew its way around the haunts of the hoi polloi. (This despite its common, arguably ignoble surname: She began life as Edith Newbold Jones.)
In Hermione Lee's rich new biography, which makes exhaustive use of "hitherto untapped sources" (mainly, its subject's lesser known nonfiction writings), we are made constantly aware of the tensions between social convention and obligation, and of a penetrating intellect's compulsion to excavate the sources and consequences of social and (quite frequently) sexual irregularity and transgression.
As she did in her masterly analytical biography of Virginia Woolf, Ms. Lee "reads" her subject's oeuvre and life as products of a brilliant woman's disciplined determination to move beyond the limitations of her upbringing and class and excel in the man's world of literary achievement. The resulting portrait of an artist certainly complements, and probably surpasses, R.W.B. Lewis' much admired and honored Wharton biography of more than 30 years ago.
Ms. Lee begins her study on a note that would be struck again and again throughout Wharton's lifetime: A trip to Paris made by Wharton's parents in 1848 (when a later French revolution was underway) is juxtaposed with Wharton's own experience of France in 1914, when she would not be content to stand and watch a civilization she adored succumb under foreign attack.
It was the pattern of Edith's life: foreign travel, residence abroad and an eventual drawing away from what she would perceive as the commercialization and cultural devaluation of her native country.
Ms. Lee offers a plaintive picture of the young Edith, indulged and encouraged in her pursuit of learning and "childhood passion for the sound of words," even as she was being groomed for entry into a society for which her parents only barely qualified. Her well meaning father's suspect earning capacity was further compromised by her imperious and foolish mother's lavish spending sprees.
It was thus all but inevitable that Edith would be married off to the ostensibly proper Bostonian Edward "Teddy" Wharton, a wan underachiever and a probable homosexual who failed to satisfy any of his ardent young spouse's needs. (Long-available evidence strongly suggests that the marriage remained unconsummated for some time, and its inevitable end was divorce.)
She was fortunate enough to have several outlets for her energies. The Atlantic Monthly had published poems written when she was a teenager (poetry was not her forte, as she quickly realized). An early product of her lifelong interest in interior design and landscape architecture and gardening was her first book, "The Decoration of Houses," written in collaboration with her friend Ogden Codman. It was generously praised as an authoritative work on its subject.
And there was travel -- to her beloved France (whence her family repeatedly returned, and where Wharton would spend her later years alone) and to Italy (which comprised "a theatre for Wharton, in which she saw acted out the survival of the ancient and the classical").
The organization of Ms. Lee's book, as thematic as it is chronological, allows the biographer to treat major themes in depth, showing their relevance to the entire span of her life and work.
Her chapter on "Italian Backgrounds," perhaps Ms. Lee's finest, thus considers both the romance and the realism Wharton gleaned from her Italian experiences (e.g., in her perception of how "the sense of ordinary lives" permeates Italian fiction, drama and even grand opera) and its specific relevance to the development of her fiction -- in Wharton's arduously researched first novel, the historical romance "The Valley of Decision." [more at the link above]

John Updike reviews Hermione Lee's new Edith Wharton biography

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/04/16/070416crbo_books_updike

The life of Edith Wharton is not an inspiriting rags-to-riches saga, nor is it a cautionary tale of riches to rags—riches to riches, rather. Born Edith Newbold Jones, in January of 1862, into one of the leading families of New York—the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” is said to have originated with reference to her great-aunts Mary and Rebecca Jones, who shocked the rest of their staid society by building a mansion north of Fifty-seventh Street, unthinkably uptown in the nineteenth century—the author maintained multiple establishments and travelled in the highest style, with a host of servants, augmenting her several inheritances by writing best-selling fiction. In the Depression year of 1936, when two thousand dollars was a good annual income, her writing earned her a hundred and thirty thousand, much of it from plays adapted from her works. Yet her well-padded, auspiciously sponsored life was not an easy one. The aristocratic social set into which she was born expected its women to be ornamental, well-sheltered, intellectually idle agents of their interwoven clans, whereas Edith was an awkward, red-haired bookworm and dreamer, teased by her two older brothers about her big hands and feet and out of sympathy with her intensely conventional mother, née Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander—a mother-daughter disharmony that rankled in Edith’s fiction to the end. She felt like a changeling, writing, in a last, unfinished effort of autobiography, “Life and I,” that her parents “were beginning to regard me with fear, like some pale predestined child who disappears at night to dance with ‘the little people.’ ”

In truth, some of her imaginative activity was alarming, as she describes it; from the age of four or five she would march up and down the house with a book in hand, pretending to read aloud words that she concocted in an “ ‘ecstasy’ of invention.” In “Life and I,” she writes of “the rapture of finding myself again in my own rich world of dreams” and of “the ecstasy which transported my little body.” Her mother disapproved and attempted to distract her with suitable playmates; her father’s library was the site of her reading pleasure, as she lay stretched out on the rug. George Frederic Jones had graduated from Columbia College, sat on charitable boards, and had inherited enough money to keep up (just barely) with his wife’s expenditures. Thrift and a dip in the family fortune prompted him to move the family to Italy and France, with their dollar-friendly economies, between 1866 and 1872; Edith returned, at the age of ten, knowing French, Italian, and German, and with a lifelong love of Europe.

In 1881, the family went again to Europe, this time for the father’s health; he and Edith saw sights in Italy with Ruskin’s writing as their guide. But George Frederic Jones died the following year, in Cannes, at the age of sixty-one, when Edith was twenty. She gave him credit for her bookish, culturally voracious side, though in her memoir “A Backward Glance” she credits her mother with arranging the private printing of her first book, “Verses,” when Edith was sixteen. Others remembered it as her father’s idea, and on her deathbed she assigned her father credit. In 1905, when “The House of Mirth” was published, to great success and acclaim, she wrote to a friend, “I often think of Papa, and wish he could have been here to encourage me with my work.” Yet had he lived, her unhappy married life, and her eventual blooming into one of the twentieth century’s finest American writers, might well have taken other turns, to posterity’s loss. The upper crust builds thick inhibitions around its would-be writers; a live father and a more compatible husband might have kept Wharton’s rather dour, frequently satiric genius sealed in a carapace of good manners and amateurish diffidence.

As Wharton’s reputation gradually emerged, after her death, in 1937, from under the cloud of her late, commercially successful but critically denigrated novels and the impression they reinforced of a facile, popular “lady novelist,” she has not lacked for biographical and critical attention. Her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley, a conservative Cambridge historian, sold her manuscripts and letters to Yale, embargoing “anything of a biographical sort” for thirty years. However, in the mid-nineteen-forties he invited Percy Lubbock, another Cambridge scholar whom Wharton had met through Henry James, to compose a memoir of her, which to some other of her acquaintances seemed a poor caricature. The embargo was lifted in 1968, and Louis Auchincloss’s friendly, elegantly illustrated brief biography, “Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time,” followed, in 1971. As early as 1966, a number of eminent American writers, including Edmund Wilson, Leon Edel, and Alfred Kazin, had been considered by the custodians of the Wharton lode for the authorized biography; the Yale professor R. W. B. Lewis was chosen. His “Edith Wharton: A Biography” came out in 1975, winning the Pulitzer Prize, and it remains, more than thirty years later, the gold standard—the Wharton biography that most people have read. Now an equally long and territorially similar biography, simply titled “Edith Wharton” (Knopf; $35), has been produced by Hermione Lee, the first female Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford and the author of book-length studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather, and Philip Roth, and of a greatly admired, nearly nine-hundred-page biography of Virginia Woolf. The reader peruses her biography of Wharton, watchful for the ways in which it differs from, and improves on, Lewis’s.

Lee tells us that her Wharton “makes use of the recent publication of her letters to Léon Bélugou and Louis Bromfield, draws on a large scatter of unpublished letters . . . and follows her trail more closely in France, Italy, and England.” These are real additions to the record, but nothing on the sensational order of the revelations that Lewis’s biography contained: an account of Wharton’s passionate affair, from 1908 to 1910, with the hitherto obscure journalist Morton Fullerton; the publication, in an appendix, of an enthusiastically pornographic fragment of an unfinished story titled “Beatrice Palmato”; and the inclusion, complete, in Lewis’s text of a long, long-lined poem, “Terminus,” addressed to Fullerton in the hot wake of his embraces in the Charing Cross Hotel.

[Continued at the link above]

Edith Wharton on Entourage

About the HBO series Entourage (from Newsday)

Amanda envisions a whole new career track for Vince, away from the action-adventure genre ("Aquaman") toward soft-edged chick flicks and period pieces. Where Ari saw a budding Schwarzenegger or (at the very least) a Tobey Maguire in Vince, Amanda sees a Hugh Grant or (at the very least) a Colin Firth. She even actually reads scripts and offers her new client a Sam Mendez-directed treatment of "Glimpses of the Moon." For a show hardly ever given to them, that's a cute little literary inside joke referring to Edith Wharton's novel about a pair of penniless flappers from the 1920s who learn to live off of well-heeled friends - just like Vince's posse.

Ari, naturally, seethes from afar. He explodes when he sees Vince and Amanda court-side at a Lakers' game - "that's the house that I built!" - and is contemptuous of the Wharton idea. "You know Edith Wharton," he tells Lloyd (Rex Lee). "The guy can't [have sex with] the woman for five years because thoooooose were the times...."

http://www.nysun.com/article/51323

The Disillusionment Of Edith Wharton
Books

BY LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
March 28, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/51323

The growing public acceptance of Edith Wharton as an American classic, accompanied as it has been in recent years with a spate of life studies and the restoration in Lenox, Mass., of her beautiful house and garden, together with the installation of her reassembled library, was bound to be followed in time by a definitive biography. Hermione Lee has now splendidly supplied this in "Edith Wharton" (Knopf, 762 pages, $35). She has given us what appears to be the totality of Wharton's life and accomplishments: not only the great novels, such as "The House of Mirth" and "The Custom of the Country," dramatizations of the cost in human lives of the American pursuit of wealth, but also, and in copious detail, the story of Wharton, the indefatigable gardener, the innovative decorator of houses, the tireless wartime worker in Paris for the refugees and the wounded, and the wide world traveler. Had Ms. Lee written a life of Jesus, there would have been a scholarly chapter on carpentry.

Wharton was born in 1862 to a highly respectable and conservative New York family who belonged to the small but tightly organized brownstone society that then dominated the city, but which was soon to find that it could only survive by accepting a merger with the robber barons whose huge fortunes had been made after the Civil War. Indeed, this very merger would be the subject of Wharton's finest books. But this fiction did not appear in her early years; she seemed more or less content to lead the life of a society matron, wed to a socially acceptable but uninteresting man, until she was nearing 40. Most of her biographers see the frustrations of an incompatible and perhaps even unconsummated marriage as forcing her into the refuge of creative writing, and Ms. Lee notes all the theories, but the evidence is scant, and much of the mystery of the development of art in a gifted human is left, inevitably, in the dark. We simply know that at forty-three she sprang up in her world as the famous author of the nationally renowned best seller "The House of Mirth" and thereafter produced an average of one book a year until her death at age 75. But there was never any idea of her being just an author. She wanted a full life, and her glory was that she had it. Her tragedy was that, deeply lonely and romantic heart, she also wanted a great love, and she never had it. Her husband was half insane, and her one lover a bounder.

Ms. Lee expounds the hopelessness of her marriage which lasted for 27 years and shouldn't have lasted for one. Teddy Wharton, aside from the golf course and hunting field, had nothing to do; he wouldn't learn French even when his wife moved him to Paris in search of a wider literary milieu than New York seemed to offer, and he was desperately bored by the intellectual chatter of her circle of rather epicene male friends. Edith did her best with him; she traveled with him; she paid for him (the money was hers); she didn't mind his girlfriends even when he supported them with money he embezzled from her trust. But when his mind unsettled, she had to divorce him. No modern woman would have waited so long.

He never had the humiliation, so far as we know, of learning of her affair with Moreton Fullerton when she was 46. Ms. Lee believes it was the sole affair of her lifetime, and she kept it very secret except for a few intimates, one of whom was Henry James. She adored Fullerton, but he was simply interested in adding her distinguished name to the long list of his conquests of both sexes. She could only grimly accept that the whole thing had been an error and return to her true vocation. The posthumous discovery of her project for a story about incest between a father and daughter, accompanied by pornographic details, has given rise to much lurid speculation among those who cannot conceive of a writer of fiction putting anything on paper that he hasn't done or wanted to do. Ms. Lee makes little of these, presumably being sensibly aware that most novelists have periods of experimental lasciviousness and often scribble them down. They're usually careful to destroy them — that's all.

from the London Review of Books

Short Cuts

Deborah Friedell

Edith Wharton’s characters are always getting into trouble at the theatre. In The Age of Innocence, it’s the place where Newland Archer first meets the disgraced Countess Olenska (and is mortified, because everyone sees her in his fiancée’s box), and where, during a production of Boucicault’s The Shaughraun, he’s drawn to her. There are rules, of course, unwritten ones, acknowledged only when broken, about how to arrive (‘in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one’s own carriage’) and when (‘it was “not the thing” to arrive early’). A woman, married or unmarried, must go with a suitable companion or not go at all: ‘One knew what to make of a woman who was “alone at the opera”.’ In The Custom of the Country, the parvenue Undine Spragg, who loves the theatre, persuades her father to rent her a night’s use of a box, but society makes her nervous, and she becomes ‘no longer capable of following the action on the stage’.

So it was with me. Hermione Lee’s biography of Edith Wharton was published on 1 February. On 2 February, I sat behind Professor Lee to watch Happy Days at the National. In Wharton’s story ‘His Father’s Son’, a man stealthily purchases, ‘under the shadow of the balcony, a stall whence he could observe the Bankshire box without fear of detection’; my proximity had happened by chance. My seat was P19 to Professor Lee’s N20 or N21, not sufficiently close to whisper a greeting, but close enough to offer one if I raised my voice. Only I couldn’t raise my voice. It would sound strident, be gauche and conspicuous: ‘Yoo-hoo, Hermione!’ I tried to catch her eye so as to bestow a little smile. A wave, a small one, wouldn’t be inappropriate, I decided – she had supervised my graduate thesis – and I permitted myself a coughing fit. But she still hadn’t seen me before, tout bonnement, up went the curtain.

I worried: what if she had seen me, and thought my failure to acknowledge her rude? I certainly didn’t want to bother her, but perhaps I should make an approach at the intermission? Talking during performances is perfectly comme il faut in Wharton – why else go to a show if not to talk to one’s friends? – so while Miss Shaw, up to her bosom in dirt, went on about existence, I asked my female companion for advice. My female companion said: ‘Shut up.’

These are not the easiest of times to be an American abroad, and for one brought up on 19th and early 20th-century Anglo-American novels, and little else, how could a move to England not induce all manner of anxieties? One lives in fear of appearing stupid and vulgar, pushy and ungrateful, of being grouped with those whom the ever correct Mrs Costello, in ‘Daisy Miller’, calls the ‘sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by not – not accepting’. And then there’s the edifying fate of Daisy Miller herself. When the American girl, in her ‘indestructible innocence, her invulnerable new-worldliness’, encounters the Old World, she is most probably doomed. Before I left America for graduate school, the professor who taught me James, noticing that my scholarship would pay for the support of a dependent spouse, told me to beware of fortune-hunters. I think she was kidding, but a Jamesian truth was perhaps not so far to seek: it was widely rumoured at Oxford that admissions standards for foreign students, who pay tuition up to five times the rate of home students, were increasingly lax. According to a recent Guardian report, to prevent a revenue shortfall British universities have budgeted for the number of foreign students to increase by 20 per cent within the next three years. They wanted us for our money.

. . .

Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Hermione Lee's bio of Wharton

Self-Made Man

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee · Chatto, 853 pp, £25.00

Edith Wharton’s ‘background’ – the word is her own – has always seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says nothing about these rumours, but it is easy to see how her own accounts of the past would have fuelled them. Despite the fact that she recalled ‘making up’ stories from her first conscious moment, both her memoirs and her fiction represent the world of her childhood as pretty much impervious to the imagination. ‘In the well-regulated well-fed Summers world,’ her heroine recalls in The Reef (1912), ‘the unusual was regarded as either immoral or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited.’ Anna Leath’s memory of Old New York is scarcely distinguishable from her creator’s. ‘In a community composed entirely of people like her parents and her parents’ friends she did not see how the magnificent things one read about could ever have happened.’

Asked what she wished to be when she grew up, Lucretia Jones’s small daughter dutifully replied (as she later recorded it): ‘The best-dressed woman in New York.’ This is not the sort of ambition James Wood had in mind when he recently suggested in the LRB (4 January) that we owe half of English literature to the aspirant mother. Of course, those sensitive and ambitious women are usually the mothers of lower-class males; and in Wharton’s case, as in that of other 19th-century women writers, identifying with a father might have been more to the point. But while she speaks more fondly of her father than of her ‘beautifully dressed mother’, the most she can manage for his literary influence is a wistful fantasy of a ‘rather rudimentary love of verse’ – predictably stifled, as she imagines it, by his wife’s ‘matter-of-factness’ – and an immense debt of gratitude for his ‘gentleman’s library’.

That library is the scene of the child’s most formative experiences and the occasion for her warmest recollections of the past. Even her mother’s prohibition of novel-reading proves ironically fruitful, as it prevents her ‘wasting . . . time over ephemeral rubbish’ and throws her back instead to ‘the great classics’. Both the impressive range of Wharton’s later reading and her lifelong habits of self-education evidently had their origins here. Characteristically, the arrangement of domestic architecture doubles in her telling as an architecture of the self: ‘there was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to intrude.’

Books offered a way out of Old New York; and by the time she published her autobiography, Wharton’s own library contained some four thousand of them, divided between her two houses in France. Yet in Wharton’s retrospective account of herself, the small child’s imaginative resistance to her environment precedes even the ability to decipher print. Edith had not yet learned to read when she first engaged in that ecstatic and solitary ritual she called ‘making up’: though she always required a book as a prop, the very unintelligibility of the pages with which she gestured permitted her to evoke whatever her fancy chose. Even before she was a reader, in other words, she was a storyteller; and the stories she was busy telling were of alternative worlds and alternative selves.

If there is some myth-making in this portrait of the artist, that myth is itself one of her many creations. Though the mature novelist would express great scorn for the American belief in perpetual self-improvement, the construction of Edith Wharton, as Hermione Lee’s biography demonstrates, was a lifelong activity. The absence of Wharton’s important women friends from A Backward Glance, Lee suggests, intensifies the impression that the achievement was the author’s alone. With formidable energy, she turned herself into an interior decorator, a writer, a charitable organiser, a war correspondent, an honorary Frenchwoman, a gardener; and at the height of her earning power, the proceeds from her books far exceeded the income she had inherited. Despite the substantial comfort into which she was born – or because of it – there is considerable truth in a friend’s joke that both Teddy Roosevelt and Edith Wharton were ‘self-made men’.

‘Atrophy,’ Lee notes, was one of Wharton’s key words; and ‘paralysis in America . . . what she most feared’. Though the spare New England setting of Ethan Frome (1911) is far removed from the well-stuffed interiors of Wharton’s childhood, the relentless plot of that novel, in which dreams of suicidal escape end in literal paralysis and the protagonist’s hated wife is nightmarishly doubled by his immobilised lover, grimly dramatises its author’s terror. Closer to home, and to the immobility against which the young Edith chafed, is the ‘static force’ of Lily Bart’s aunt in The House of Mirth (1905): ‘To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor.’ Long after Wharton herself had escaped first into writing and then to Europe, her narratives enter the cul-de-sac in which Lily passively colludes in her own destruction. But tugging at that furniture also gave her energy – so much so that she gleefully screwed it to the floor again and again. The satirical vehemence with which Wharton represents her parents’ world can make it easy to forget that the obdurate environment of Old New York is at least partly her creation too.

Furniture was more than a metaphor for Wharton. ‘You don’t know her till you have seen her as builder and restorer, designer, decorator, gardener,’ Henry James wrote to another impassioned interior decorator, their mutual friend Mary Hunter, in 1913. At the time, Wharton was contemplating the purchase of a substantial estate near where Hunter lived in Essex; but while this came to nothing, the novelist’s relations with domestic property loom almost as large in her history as her relations with books. An often repeated anecdote in A Backward Glance tells of her first attempt at novel-writing being summarily quashed by her literal-minded mother, who responded to the 11-year-old’s opening lines – ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?” said Mrs Tompkins. “If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room”’ – by icily observing: ‘Drawing-rooms are always tidy.’ That put a stop to fiction for a time. But Lucretia Jones’s capacity to freeze up her daughter’s energies should not obscure the premonitory significance of the exchange. From Wharton’s first published book, The Decoration of Houses, written with Ogden Codman in 1897, to the extravagant gardens at her French property in Hyères whose design she oversaw in her sixties, her imagination was deeply invested in the arrangement of domestic space. Though Mrs Edward (Teddy) Wharton began her married life in a ‘cottage’ on her mother’s Newport estate, a substantial legacy from a millionaire cousin in the late 1880s assured that none of her future drawing-rooms would belong to her mother. Codman worked with Wharton on houses for the couple in Newport and New York: Land’s End, an $80,000 mansion overlooking the Atlantic that she later described as ‘incurably’ ugly, and ‘a little shanty in Park Avenue’ that she and Teddy called the smallest house in New York. These were followed by her most famous residence in the US – the 35-room mansion known as The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts – and eventually by apartments in Paris, an 18th-century villa near Fontainebleau, and the Provençal house that she named Ste-Claire-le-Château, built on the site of a 17th-century convent in the old part of Hyères. Only The Mount was constructed from scratch, but all bore the unmistakeable imprint of Wharton’s design.

A sophisticated gardener as well as interior decorator, whose Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) is still cited by writers on garden history, Wharton threw herself into the arrangement of plants and flowers with the same passion and eye for detail that she devoted to her books. Reconstructing gardens in print is not easy, but Lee makes a convincing case for the theatrical flair and colour of Wharton’s. Towards the end of her life, Wharton herself told a friend that she thought her gardens were ‘better than her books’. However that may be, they were clearly more ephemeral: one of the most poignant episodes in Lee’s biography concerns Wharton’s devastation when a catastrophic frost in the winter of 1928-29 wiped out virtually everything she had planted at Hyères. ‘How dangerous to care too much,’ she noted in her diary, ‘even for a garden!’

Wharton’s zeal for home-making had little to do with her feelings for her husband. Long before she divorced him in 1913, her publicly acknowledged affections attached themselves more to place than to family. ‘I feel as if I were going to get married – to the right man at last,’ she joked to a friend in anticipation of the move to Hyères in 1922. Though her marriage endured for 28 years, she and Teddy seem to have had scarcely anything in common apart from a zest for travel, a love of motor cars and a fondness for little dogs; and the increasing evidence of his mental illness – what we would now call bipolar disorder or manic depression – meant that most observers seem to have sympathised with the wife. ‘A divorce is always a good thing to have: you never can tell when you may want it,’ a friend advises the superbly vulgar heroine of The Custom of the Country (1913), the fierce satire of contemporary American mores that was appearing in serial form even as Wharton filed for divorce in a Paris court. Lee contends that previous biographers have unduly emphasised the ladylike reluctance with which Wharton took that step: once it had become clear that Teddy was impossible to live with, she argues, Wharton proceeded to free herself with grim determination. The heroine of The Custom of the Country is emphatically not her author; but neither the appetite nor the ambition of Undine Spragg (‘US’, in short) was altogether alien to her. Attacking the very ease with which the thrice-divorced Undine sheds inconvenient partners would have helped to drive home the difference.

At the age of 20, Edith Jones had been briefly engaged to a wealthy young man called Harry Stevens; but according to Town Topics, the sort of gossip rag she would send up in The House of Mirth, ‘an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride’ caused the engagement to be broken off. She first became acquainted with the lawyer and future diplomat Walter Berry in the aftermath of that engagement; in later years, many who knew them assumed that she and Berry were lovers. But the truth about this long-lived intimacy, as about much of Wharton’s private life, is elusive. Though she could make high comedy out of her mother’s habits of censorship, her own powers of concealment rivaled Lucretia’s. Berry’s death in 1927 may have left Wharton ‘utterly rudderless’, as she wrote to Bernard Berenson; but she still managed to get into his Paris apartment and to burn almost all the letters she had ever written to him. ‘No words can say, because such things are unsayable, how the influence of his thought, his character, his deepest personality, were interwoven with mine,’ she declared in A Backward Glance; but this is far from the only aspect of her history, as Lee makes clear, that is treated as ‘unsayable’. In that book Teddy himself puts in only the most minimal appearance, while he disappears entirely from the published records of their travels in Italy and France. Wharton’s mother once instructed her to ‘look out of the other window’ when the notorious mistress of a New York banker was passing in her carriage; and A Backward Glance sedulously looks elsewhere when it comes to the passionate affair the still-married author herself conducted with the journalist Morton Fullerton in her forties.

She would have thought it a bitter irony that Fullerton’s own casualness with his papers has made this one of her most extensively documented relationships. Wharton’s complete letters have yet to be published, but only Berenson appears more frequently as a correspondent in the selection edited by R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis in 1988. ‘I beg instant cremation for this,’ she was writing to Fullerton almost from the start; but the fact that the erotically adventurous Fullerton had already been the victim of one blackmail attempt does not seem to have made him wary about the survival of evidence. Yet Wharton’s instinct for privacy contended against her needs as a writer; and even before some three hundred of her letters to Fullerton mysteriously surfaced in 1985, R.W.B. Lewis was able to reconstruct the story of their affair from a secret diary that she had preserved and named, after a poem by Pierre Ronsard, ‘The Life Apart: L’Ame Close’. When Lewis’s biography first appeared in 1975, his detailed account of the affair, together with the reprinting of ‘Beatrice Palmato’, a hitherto unknown fragment of soft porn about father-daughter incest, appeared to overturn the established image of Wharton as a strait-laced grande dame – ‘puritanically repressed within’, in Lewis’s phrase, as well as formidable without. The passage of time, however, as well as considerable scholarship on Victorian sexuality, has made the erotic intensity of all that strait-lacing seem less surprising than inevitable. Without minimising the reality of the affair, Lee also makes clear how much of Wharton’s creative powers were invested in the experience. Kept concurrently with her appointments diary, ‘The Life Apart’ both records and invents the author’s belated awakening to love.

[for more, click on the link]

Boston Globe interview with Hermione Lee

Q&A with Hermione Lee

By Kate Bolick | April 1, 2007

A third of the way through her absorbing new biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee pauses to consider her subject's erotic appeal to Morton Fullerton, the notorious rogue she'd taken, in midlife, as her lover. "Exposing the concealed, thwarted, passionate self hidden under the gloves and furs could have been very intriguing to a certain kind of curious, adventurous sensualist," she writes. And, perhaps, to a certain kind of biographer?

"Well, that's it!" Lee laughed when I asked her as much over the phone last week. "Edith does this extraordinary mixture of dazzling ironical objective analysis, yet at the same time, there's this very deep, painful emotional life that goes rushing through. I was drawn to this combination that I don't think I've found in any other writer," she explained. The first-name basis, the disarming present tense -- it was easy to envision the grande dame herself hovering just beyond our conversation, a cup of tea at her elbow (in, of course, the perfect hand-painted Limoges porcelain cup)

. . .

IDEAS: Wharton's reputation has shifted drastically over the years.

LEE: Well, in her lifetime, starting with "The House of Mirth" in 1905, she became hugely popular and an enormous bestseller. Then, in the 1930s, with the Depression, and the radical change of style and much more openness coming in about sexuality, she began to be seen as frosty and old-fashioned and as kind of a minor feminine Henry James. So from her death in 1937 through the '60s she languished.

And then interesting things happened: the big biography in 1975 by R.W.B. Lewis; the publication of quite a lot of posthumous papers, which changed our sense of her; the feminist movement of the late '60s and early '70s, when Wharton, like a lot of other women writers, was given a new standing. And, of course, the movies.

. . .

IDEAS: Yet even now, she's still seen as a passionless woman.

LEE: Unfair to Edith! Morton Fullerton clearly found her rather erotic, and he was a specialist in those things. When he finally delivers his copy of "Terminus" -- the long, Whitmanesque poem that she wrote after their night of love in the Charing Cross Hotel (which, I must say, is the most unromantic building in all of London) -- to Elisina Tyler, Edith's closest woman friend, years after Edith's death, he says that her reputation for being cold and icy was unjustified.

Besides, you can see from the writing how much she knew about sex and sexuality. "The Reef" is the most amazing novel about someone who hasn't been very sexy suddenly having all these sexual emotions of jealousy and dependency and humiliation. It's very close to the bone.

IDEAS: The Fullerton years are pretty juicy. Why did this strong, independent woman fall for such a cad?

LEE: Well, women do, don't they? The really interesting thing is the way the affair -- which lasted two or three years maximum -- seemed to reenact and anticipate an Edith Wharton novel. Her letters to him, and the way he let her down, and the fact that she couldn't lean on him during her husband's mental illness and the breakdown of her marriage. . . .You can see Fullerton distancing himself, backing off, thinking, "Oh this is more than I bargained for." It's just like one of her stories, like "The Long Run," or Lawrence Selden in "The House of Mirth." It's almost as if she picked the sort of person she already knew about from her fiction. The magnificent letters she wrote to Fullerton could have come straight from the mouth of one of her heroines.

IDEAS: She was also deeply invested in style, as you point out, and caught up in the conversations at the turn of the century about the morality of taste.

LEE: One of the fascinating things about Edith's relationship to Europe is how much she was enthralled to Flaubert and Stendhal and Balzac. She wanted to write novels of society and novels of manners -- not about isolated individuals -- that's for sure. And she wanted to write with the utmost, Flaubertian objectivity. So she never says "I" in the fiction; she says "I" in the poetry (which I think is much less good than the fiction).

Yet her own life plays through in many complicated ways in all her writing. She was wedded to the idea of objectivity, control, shape, form -- she's a great shaper of sentences, sentence by sentence on the page; at her best she's a remarkable stylist. But at the same time she didn't want to be classified as a sentimental woman novelist, in the way that often happens in that period: she's harsh, strong, powerful, direct, often kind of barren and plain.

Review of Hermione Lee's biography of Wharton

Edith Wharton

* Patricia Anderson
* February 24, 2007

Edith Wharton
By Hermione Lee
Chatto & Windus, 845pp, $79.95

IN the market-driven world of publishing, breathless comments on a book's back cover are increasingly unhelpful: "A rich new life of a great novelist", "first biography of Edith Wharton by a British woman writer", "challenges the accepted view", and so on. All very irritating. The first suggests that former biographers of Wharton had scant insight into her intricately layered life, the second that the respected biographer, Hermione Lee, needs to be identified as a woman rather than simply a British writer, the third that there is some accepted view of the remarkable Wharton, a kind of cuckoo in a brownstone nest, that needs to be challenged. Not so. The phenomenon of Edith Wharton, a writer more celebrated in her day than her friend Henry James (a fact he chafed at), and whose book The Mother's Recompense outsold Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, was dissected by R.W.B. Lewis in his Pulitzer prize-winning 1975 biography. It was a miracle of compression, insight and graceful writing, and would always be a difficult act to follow, as this new biography demonstrates.

That said, Lee's magisterial work will delight the forensically-minded Wharton fan, not so much for new insights (this reviewer found few) but for "new archive material", and the sheer scale of the digressions and meanderings throughout its 845 pages. Indeed, she has succumbed to the biographer's greatest weakness: not knowing what to dispense with.

London Times review of new Hermione Lee biography of Wharton

From The Times (London)

When Edith Wharton died in 1937 she was working on two books. One, The Buccaneers, a novel about vivacious young American heiresses marrying into Britain’s aristocracy, celebrates female vitality. The other was a collection of ghost stories. Together, they highlight qualities — dauntless energy, haunted responsiveness to the past — that, as Hermione Lee’s biography demonstrates, made her into America’s greatest woman novelist.

Wharton spent her early years in a world as strait-laced as a whalebone corset. The Old New York brownstone élite into which she was born in 1862 was a society stiff with plutocratic correctness, typified by her mother Lucretia, a glacial assemblage of expensive clothes and conventional attitudes. In this milieu, Edith’s bookishness marked her out as a misfit (rumours that she must be illegitimate persisted). Her first attempt, aged 11, at a novel, which began “ ‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown?’ said Mrs Tompkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room’ ”, was returned by her mother with the icy comment, “Drawing-rooms are always tidy.” A photograph of her as a debutante, rigid in flounced finery, testifies to the strain she felt.

The “suitable” marriage she was steered into at 23 intensified this. An affable, sporty duffer unable to rise to what he called Edith’s “high plain of thought”, Teddy Wharton proved a disastrous husband. Marital misery (later a prominent theme in her fiction) soon took its toll. Nervous prostrations plagued them both. Sexually, the marriage seems to have been more or less a nonstarter. Emotionally and intellectually, there was an ever-widening gulf. After years of increasingly unstable behaviour, Teddy (like his father, who committed suicide in an asylum) sank into manic-depressive derangement.

Not surprisingly, thwarted lives and bids to escape them feature frequently in Wharton’s fiction. But it wasn’t, Lee reminds you, until the age of 43, with The House of Mirth, her bestselling novel about the elegant savageries of Gilded Age New York, that she made her literary breakthrough. Before that, her pent-up energies found vent in marathons of reading, the creation of an imposing country house and garden in New England, and increasingly adventurous travels. Motoring became a passion (exhilaratingly transmitted in travelogues about her “braveries of far excursionism”, as her friend and sometimes fellow-passenger, Henry James, put it). Europe bewitched and liberated her. The autobiography she wrote in her seventies glows with scenes recalled from visits there as a child: artists’ models lounging among daffodils and violets on Rome’s Spanish Steps, scarlet and gold cardinals rumbling though Trastevere in their coaches at twilight, Second Empire beauties swaying in open carriages under the chestnut trees of the Bois de Boulogne. As her career blossomed, she spent more and more time first in Italy, then France, where she lived for her last three decades.

Devoting two-thirds of its length to these French years, Lee’s biography differs from previous ones in emphasising Wharton’s European experiences such as her prodigies of relief work for her adopted country during the first world war (she ran an organisation that, she calculated, helped 9,229 refugees, served 235,000 meals and distributed 48,333 garments to the needy in its first year alone). There are also detailed accounts of the homes, the Pavillon Colombe north of Paris and Ste-Claire-le-Château overlooking Hyères on the Riviera, between which she divided her post-war summers and winters. True to the large-scale lifestyle to which inherited wealth and even greater literary earnings accustomed her, she considered the Pavillon, a three-storey, 18th-century gem, to be a “tiny bungalow”. Ste-Claire, which had seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, a dining room, drawing room, study, 2,000-volume library, morning room, kitchen, scullery, pantry, linen-room, sewing-room and butler’s “brushing room”, was “minuscule”.

Closer attention is given here than elsewhere to Wharton’s secret affair, not long before the terminal breakdown of her marriage, with Morton Fullerton, an American journalist in Paris with a gaudy history of bisexual liaisons and blackmail threats. Her emotional letters to him, a burningly candid private journal she kept during their two years as lovers and an achingly erotic poem about a parting night of passion in a railway hotel convey, as if in some unsparing, voluptuous novella by Colette, the grateful pleasure, confusion and humiliation of a physically inexperienced woman in her forties entangled with a silkily proficient philanderer.

Wharton and Dieting

From Spiked: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2782/
Fretting over our waistlines has a long history. There was already medical discussion about the problem of obesity in the late nineteenth century, but as a ‘product rather than a cause’ of the prejudice against excess weight. Within a few years, this issue started impacting on popular culture. In 1907 a popular American play called Nobody Likes a Fat Man was staged, and in 1913 Edith Wharton described one of her characters fretting about being anything more than ‘perpendicular’. As the authors of Diet Nation note, in one respect ‘the century-long European and American preoccupation with thinness and the rejection of fat is very much a social construct in which obesity is increasingly associated with the morally unacceptable’ (p33).

[Note: The Custom of the Country was published in 1913.]

Play based on Wharton's life

From Variety: pair launch production company

Producers Jennifer Chaiken and Sebastian Dungan have launched 72 Prods., a Los Angeles-based production shingle backed by a private equity fund dedicated to acquisition and development of feature film projects in the $5 million-to-$25 million budget range.

Current projects on the 72 slate:"The Perfect Hour," penned by Deborah Quinn and Derek Simonds, who will also direct. The drama's set in 1907 and based on a recently discovered cache of Edith Wharton's letters that revealed that Wharton -- though married -- was a virgin until an affair in her forties with a younger man. "Hour" will be produced in association with Ross Katz ("Marie Antoinette," "Lost in Translation").

Edith Wharton and Newport

From the New York Times:

Mr. Fleming, an urban planner based in Cambridge, Mass., who has written six books on historic preservation, has a proselytizing zeal on the subject of America's great mansions, and a consuming obsession with the welfare of his own. Hoping to make it a comfortable gathering place for his children in the wake of his recent divorce, he set about restoring it to its one-time glory. The project took seven years, and was finally completed late last month.

Luckily, he had a guide in this undertaking: "The Decoration of Houses," the influential handbook that Codman published with his client and friend Edith Wharton in 1897. Codman and Wharton, who often bickered, were as one in their disdain for the pompous Newport "cottages" built by Gilded Age robber barons, and for the "dubious eclecticism" of High Victorian style. They advocated a return to "suitability, simplicity and proportion," ideals in keeping with Mr. Fleming's stringent classical tastes, and very much in evidence in Codman's design for Bellevue House.

Edith Wharton Dinner at MLA 2006

The Edith Wharton Society is sponsoring a dinner event at the 2006 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. The dinner will be at 7 p.m. on December 28, 2006, at

Ristorante La Buca
711 Locust Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
(215) 928-0556

The restaurant is about 8 blocks from the Marriott.

Please send your check in US funds for $35 for members and $45 for non-members per person and the reservation form by

December 10, 2006

to

Carole Shaffer-Koros
VE 114A
1000 Morris Avenue
Kean University
Union, NJ 07083

If you have mislaid the sign-up form from the recent _Edith Wharton Review_, a printable form suitable for sending with your check is available here: http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org/whartondinner2006.htm

Edith Wharton Stories Performed

From Helene Davis:

SYMPHONY SPACE RELEASES TWO NEW SELECTED SHORTS CD SETS: EDITH WHARTON and FALLING IN LOVE

Read By KATHLEEN CHALFANT, MARIA TUCCI, JANE CURTIN, FIONNULA FLANAGAN, WILLIAM HURT & OTHERS

New York, NY, November 22, 2006 - Symphony Space has released two new CD sets from its award-winning National Public Radio series, Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story: Falling In Love and Edith Wharton. The series, which presents Broadway and Hollywood actors reading classic and new short stories, is now in its 20th radio season.

EDITH WHARTON (2-CD set: running time, 2 hours)

EDITH WHARTON features five stories which were recorded live at the Mount, the Massachusetts home of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was best known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Wharton's central subjects were the conflict between social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the 'nouveau riche,' who had made their fortunes in more recent years.

• Mrs. Manstey’s View, read by Kathleen Chalfant. You are what you view - an Edith Wharton-era real estate story.
• Roman Fever, read by Maria Tucci.What happened that night in Rome so long ago? The secret revealed.
• The Reckoning, read by Brenda Wehle. The high price of marital harmony.
• Xingu, read by Christina Pickles. Wild goings-on at a ladies' book group.
  

FALLING IN LOVE (3-CD set, running time 3 hours)

This new 3-CD set features the following stories, which were recorded live at Symphony Space in NYC:

• Fires by Rick Bass, read by Ted Marcoux. In the Rockies a woman sets fire to a parched field to take the plunge into the pool of love.
• The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping by Padgett Powell, read by Christina Pickles. An eccentric southern dame cleans up her act and finds love.
• The Lone Pilgrim by Laurie Colwin, read by Hope Davis. A New York artist longs for love and marital domesticity.
• Melisande by E. Nesbit, read by Jane Curtin. A delicious fairy tale about a princess with a terrible curse.
• Violets by Edna O’Brien, read by Fionnula Flanagan. A subtle portrait of a woman caught in an impossible affair.
• Travis, B. by Maile Meloy, read by William Hurt. A Western love story between a lonesome cowboy and a city gal.
  

The CD sets are available on the Symphony Space website, at www.symphonyspace.org. For information on any Symphony Space program or event, call (212) 864-5400.


GENERAL INFORMATION

For nearly 30 years, Symphony Space has been producing and presenting artistically and culturally diverse music, dance, literary, theatre, family, and film programs that bring artists and audiences together in an atmosphere of exploration and intimacy. One of New York’s preeminent and most reasonably priced cultural resources, and a leader in adventurous programming, its signature events include Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, hosted by Isaiah Sheffer and nationally broadcast on public radio; Bloomsday on Broadway readings; Upper West Fest, a three-week cultural extravaganza involving more than twenty neighborhood institutions; and Wall to Wall music events and other marathons, which The New York Times called Symphony Space’s “annual gift to New York City.” Symphony Space’s programs reach audiences throughout New York and, via its touring and media program, the nation. Symphony Space also serves thousands of New York City schoolchildren each year via its Curriculum Arts Project, one of the oldest and most respected arts education programs in existence. Symphony Space’s Artistic Director is Isaiah Sheffer; Executive Director, Cynthia Elliott; and Managing Director, Peggy Wreen.

Haunted Mount?

From Capetown, South Africawww.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=29&art_id=iol1162365405524A136]- From novelist Edith Wharton's palatial mansion in Lenox, Massachusetts, to a Gold Rush shack in This Old House on Tuesday profiled 15 of the nation's spookiest houses - and offered some tips on how to hire a reliable ghostbuster.
. . .

Wharton, who died in 1937 at the age of 75, is said to still haunt her estate, called The Mount, sending indoor temperatures icy when she appears.

Age of Innocence on TCM, December 20, 2006

The 1934 film version of The Age of Innocence will be shown on Turner Classic Movies on December 20, 2006, at 10:30 a.m. This film is not available on video or DVD, so if you want to see it, this is probably your only chance this year.

Wharton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lewis Carroll

From Calendarlive.com

Thirteen years after "Snark," Carroll published the first part of his novel "Sylvie and Bruno," in which the Professor begins reciting, "Once upon a time there was a Boojum— " and stops. "I forget the rest of the Fable," he admits. "And there was a lesson to be learned from it. I'm afraid I forget that, too." Many people in the real world have also forgotten. In her autobiography, Edith Wharton recounted a story about her friend Theodore Roosevelt, whose enthusiasm for "Snark" led to a farcical scene.

One day, Roosevelt admonished the secretary of the Navy, "Mr. Secretary, what I say three times is true!" And the less literate gentleman replied stiffly, "Mr. President, it would never for a moment have occurred to me to impugn your veracity." How Lewis Carroll would have chuckled over the ironies of posthumous fame.

Wharton and Happiness

New York Observer Review of The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud.

'There are lots of ways to be miserable," Edith Wharton once wrote, "but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that's to stop running around after happiness." In the hundred years since Wharton published these words, Americans, especially the cultural elite, have not learned their lesson.

In New York City, the setting of Wharton's finest fictions -- and where "success" and "happiness" are often used interchangeably -- there's a clock tick-tocking by the bedside of every aspiring young writer or intellectual. If your debut novel hasn't landed by the time you turn 30, you're washed up. If you haven't earned tenure by 40, pack it up. You're through.

About Wyndclyffe

"History vs. the Bulldozer" from Newsday:

On a wooded river bluff in Rhinecliff, N.Y., a Romanesque castle called Wyndclyffe stands boarded up, its roof partly caved in. Surrounded by comparably modest getaways of recent vintage, its once-ample grounds have shrunk to a two-acre lot. This crumbling castle, built in 1853 for an aunt of Gilded Age chronicler Edith Wharton - the spinster Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones - it is said to have been the origin of the expression, "keeping up with the Joneses," because, when it was built, the neighbors rushed to gussy up their own millionaire manors.

Wyndclyffe is among the few dozen imperiled monuments profiled in "Hudson Valley Ruins," by Thomas Rinaldi and Robert J. Yasinsac (University Press of New England, 356 pp., $35).

It takes a middle road between the extravagant picture-book of erstwhile luxury estates and the scholarly architectural catalog, giving overviews of endangered sites by region, and telling in detail the life stories of several properties in each area.

A. R. Gurney and Edith Wharton

From Backstage:

"I love the world he creates -- the way he delineates the WASP tribe, whose heroes are bound and defined by their society," says Lamos, who also helmed Gurney's Big Bill at Lincoln Center Theater and, as artistic director of Hartford Stage, produced Gurney's Children and an adaptation of his novel The Snow Ball. Comparing the playwright to Edith Wharton, Lamos says, "I lived in New England and know the world he's talking about. He is evenhanded and the economy of his writing is unequaled. He is a miniaturist. He just tells you enough, yet the depth and psychology are there. The challenge is to find the simplicity and economy in the staging and cast actors who have sensitivity to tonal shifts that take place in the moment.""

The Edith Wharton Essay Prize (Deadline: 10/30/06)

The Edith Wharton Essay Prize

The Edith Wharton Essay Prize is awarded annually for the best unpublished essay on Edith Wharton by a beginning scholar. Graduate students, independent scholars, and faculty members who have not held a tenure-track or full-time appointment for more than four years are eligible to submit their work.

The winning essay will be published in The Edith Wharton Review, a peer-reviewed journal, and the writer will receive an award of $250.

All entries will be considered for publication in The Edith Wharton Review as well as for the Edith Wharton Essay Prize. Submissions should be 15-25 pages in length and should follow the new 6 th edition MLA style, using endnotes, not footnotes.

Applicants should not identify themselves on the manuscript but should provide a separate cover page that includes their names, academic status, e-mail address, postal addresses, and the notation “The Edith Wharton Essay Prize.”

To submit an essay for the prize, send three copies by 30 October 2006 to either of the editors of The Edith Wharton Review:

Prof. Carole M. Shaffer-Koros
Dean of the School of Visual and Performing Arts
VE-114A
Kean University
Union, NJ 07083

Prof. Linda Costanzo-Cahir
W 1091
Kean University
Union, NJ 07083

The Academy of Music

From the New York Sun:

When the rich families moved away, Union Square became the fancy shopping district. Such stores as Tiffany's and Brentano's Literary Emporium, and restaurants like Delmonico's and Lüchow's, were there. In Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," which is set in the 1870s, society ritually congregates at the Academy of Music, on the northeast corner of 14th Street and Irving Place. (It was torn down for the Consolidated Edison Building, and shouldn't be confused with the much later movie theater called the Academy of Music on the other side of 14th Street.) Theaters abounded around Union Square in the late 19th century, making it the forerunner to today's Times Square theater district.

An allusion to "False Dawn"

From the New York Daily News: Now you see 'em at museums

'Moonlight' by Ralph Blakelock is one of many American paintings now on view that until recently were consigned to storage. In an Edith Wharton novella set in the mid-19th century, the scion of an aristocratic New York family - a young man who has studied art history - travels to Europe to buy "pictures" (what we today would call paintings). Unfortunately, the young man has acquired taste and a serious eye. Instead of buying the opulent, bright - and huge - canvases his relatives imagined adorning the walls of their mansion, he acquires small, exquisite early Renaissance works. The family is mortified. For the rest of his life he is an outcast. Not until after his death, decades later, does the value, both esthetic and financial, of his collection become apparent. The story was one of many in which Wharton deplored the materialism and philistinism of the wealthy, dull people among whom she had grown up. Like wealthy families, museums sometimes acquire things whose value becomes clear only with time.

From 2004 (see also all the NYTimes pieces on Wharton at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/edith_wharton/index.html?inline=nyt-per; registration is required, but some articles are free)

Edith Wharton: A Manhattan Literary Giant Who Didn't Love New York

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: September 12, 2004

DITH WHARTON, whose deft portraits of the upper class are taken as definitive accounts of the late 19th century, remains one of the most potent names in the literature of New York. Not that she was a partisan of the city. Her portraits of New York were almost uniformly negative, and she left the city as soon as she could. That's why, in part, the physical traces of the author of "The Age of Innocence" and "The House of Mirth" are few and far between. Edith Newbold Jones, as she was called at birth, was born in 1862 to George Frederic Jones and his wife, the former Lucretia Rhinelander, both from genteel families with roots in 18th century New York. In 1857 they built a brownstone at 14 West 23rd Street. The house as the family knew it is long gone, but an early photograph shows a wide, Anglo-Italianate-style brownstone mansion four stories high, with rusticated stone on the ground floor and simple window moldings on the floors above. The Jones house had a certain repose about it — it might have been designed by a master builder, or perhaps even a real architect. (Go to NYT for more)

Louis Auchincloss on the Five Best Novellas

The Long and the Short of It
The best novellas.

BY LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Saturday, July 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

From the Wall Street Journal

1. "Madame de Treymes" By Edith Wharton (Scribner's, 1907).

A notable form of fiction, the novella is approved more by the reading public of yesterday than of to day. Its length is hard to specify other than to say that it is usually not long enough to justify a separate publication under its own covers, yet it is certainly a useful form for any subject too simple for a novel but too complex to be fitted within the limits of a short story. Edith Wharton's "Madame de Treymes" is a remarkable example of the form. It is the story of the tactical defeat but moral victory of an honest and upstanding American in his struggle to win a wife from a tightly united but feudally minded French aristocratic family. He loses, but they cheat. It is essentially the same tale with the same moral as James's full-length novel "The American." In a masterpiece of brevity, Wharton dramatizes the contrast between the two opposing forces: the simple and proper old brownstone New York, low in style but high in principle, and the achingly beautiful but decadent Saint-Germain district of Paris. The issue is seamlessly joined.

If Edith Wharton had a blog

From literary blogger Maud Newton :

Unless you’re Thomas Pynchon, it’s not enough these days to write a book and publish it. Today’s author is expected to pimp her novels by any means necessary — with interminable readings, book club talks, temporary tattoos, hideous and ill-fitting t-shirts, fanciful diagrams, and of course blogs. This makes perfect sense. After all, most writers choose to sequester themselves with books and papers for weeks on end precisely because they enjoy and excel at interacting with the rest of humanity.

As Katharine Weber’s latest novel, Triangle, appears, she tries to imagine Edith Wharton in today’s publishing environment:

Would she send out ‘tsotsch,’ as one publicist calls it enthusiastically — pencils, say, with House of Mirth stamped in gold and a smiley face pin affixed to the end? Had she written a novel of particular interest to Jewish readers (unlikely, given her appalling references to Simeon Rosedale, but I forgive her), would she have dressed up as a giant dreidel at the Jewish Book Council reception at BEA? Would she go on The View? Would she have an Amazon Blog?

Yes, Weber decides: Wharton’s publisher would require her to have an Amazon Blog. Weber channels the Ethan Frome author below.

From Forbes.Com

New York -

In Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence, there is a character of some quality who has fallen into disrepute and who ends his days in exile in Argentina representing a large insurance company. He dies in "an odor of prosperity."

Just such an odor wafts over insurance companies. It hangs between them and the dark clouds of misfortune and blacker ones of catastrophe, providing the umbrella of capital.

From The Guardian
The author's curse

David Lodge spent three years writing and researching a biographical novel about Henry James. Then he learned that at least four other writers had been at work on similar projects. Soon he found himself caught up in a web of irony and coincidence worthy of a Jamesian plot

If anyone deserves to win this year's Man Booker Prize, it's Henry James. During 2004, he has been the originator of no fewer than three outstanding novels.

Thus began Peter Kemp's review of my novel, Author, Author, in the Sunday Times of August 29 2004, a few days before its official publication date. The other two novels to which he referred were Colm Tóibín's The Master, published in March of that year, and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, published in April. Henry James is the central character of both The Master and Author, Author. The central character of The Line of Beauty, which is set in the 1980s, is a young man who is writing a postgraduate thesis on Henry James, and Hollinghurst's novel was seen by several critics as a stylistic homage to him.

Kemp did not mention another novel about Henry James, which had been published in November 2002 and was reissued as a paperback in the spring of 2004, Emma Tennant's Felony, which spliced together an account of James's relationship with the American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and a speculative retelling of the source story of his novella, The Aspern Papers. Nor did Kemp mention - probably he was not aware of its existence - yet another novel about James, by the South African writer Michiel Heyns, which was being offered to London publishers in 2004. Entitled The Typewriter's Tale, and narrated from the point of view of James's secretary, it concerned James's involvement, in the years 1907-10, in a love affair between two of his closest friends, the novelist Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton, bisexual journalist and man of letters. We know all this about a book that is still unpublished because Michiel Heyns wrote an eloquent and poignant article in Prospect magazine in September 2004 about coming last in the procession of James-inspired novelists. These were its opening words: "My agent forwards to me another polite letter of rejection: 'I am so sorry but timing is all - and there has been a spate of fiction based on the life of Henry James published here. I don't know how such coincidences happen ... something in the atmosphere? So regretfully I must say no.'"

Donors of Wharton Library Revealed (from the Buffalo News)

Anonymous no longer

For about a century, writer Edith Wharton's personal library was overseas. Now, thanks to a pair of Buffalonians, the collection has been bought and returned to The Mount, Wharton's onetime home in Lenox, Mass.

The caretakers of The Mount bought the personal library for $2.6 million from its owner in England, through the help of an anonymous, private donor, according to the Associated Press.

At a recent ceremony celebrating the collection's return, the couple's identity was revealed: Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers.

The chairman of M&T Bank and his wife, who heads Roche and Co., attended the event, whose guest list included a famous former librarian, first lady Laura Bush.

The Wilmers are longtime supporters of The Mount and have a home in the area. Four years ago, Roche and Co. sponsored the restoration and decoration of the mansion's forecourt and entrance hall.

From the Albany Capital News site:

First Lady Laura Bush visits Lenox
Updated: 4/25/2006 10:41 AM
By: Ryan Peterson

The Mount, the estate that author Edith Wharton designed and built in 1902, is in the midst of a complete restoration. One of the restoration's goals was to purchase Wharton's library and bring it back home. That goal was reached with the help of a $2.6 million donation that First Lady Laura Bush helped celebrate at a ceremony on Monday.

Mrs. Bush said, "Many of these books contain notes and editorial changes that Edith made in her early editions of her own works. Several books have inscriptions from her close friends who were historical figures in their own right, people like President Theodore Roosevelt and Henry James."

The staff at The Mount in Lenox was very excited and honored to have Mrs. Bush pay a visit. Mrs. Bush, who is a former librarian, said on national television in 2001 that Edith Wharton is one of her favorite authors.

"As a librarian and a lover of literature, I believe it's important for Americans to be able to visit the homes of our most renowned and beloved authors," she said.

From the Seattle Times: (Review of House of Mirth play running through May 13, 2006)

Classic story of woman's quest for social status

By Misha Berson

Seattle Times theater critic

"Everything about her was both vigorous and exquisite," wrote Edith Wharton of her definitive character Lily Bart.

The same can be said of actress Jennifer Lee Taylor, the captivating Lily in Book-It Repertory Theatre's "The House of Mirth."

With her fair, translucent beauty, aristocratic carriage and sleek charm, Taylor is every inch the Gilded Age enchantress Wharton described in her brilliant novel — and the ethical self-doubter, too.

Playing across Taylor's lovely face (she resembles a young Meryl Streep) are the conflicting desires that make her, ultimately, masochistic and noble. Lily attempts to both cultivate her conscience and seek her fortune in the nouveau riche piranha tank of Old New York. Alas, the two impulses turn out to be tragically incompatible.

From the Times Literary Supplement:

Isabelle de Tuyll, the prolific eighteenth-century writer who adopted the nom de guerre of Zélide and whose suitors included James Boswell and Benjamin Constant, was also rescued from oblivion by a biography with “a strong visual sense”. In 1925, following the lead of Lytton Strachey, a young architectural historian called Geoffrey Scott produced a compact, sceptical and elegantly written Portrait of Zélide. Scott underwent what Holmes calls “the classic ‘transfer experience’ of the modern biographer, starting as the detached scholar but gradually being drawn hypnotically into all the domestic details and dramas of Zélide’s world”. Part of the reason Scott was drawn in was that the story reflected his own emotional entanglements with numerous older women, including Mary Berenson, Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West, all of whom he shamelessly told were the real and secret dedicatees of his book. Holmes also believes that Scott’s book, although not exactly feminist, “changed forever the way English biographers wrote (or simply failed to write about) women. It recognized that women’s lives had different shapes from men’s, different emotional patterns of achievement and failure”.

Garrison Keillor on Edith Wharton

I have an after-dinner speech about marriage that is 15 minutes long and somewhat funny. ("The rules for marriage are the same as for a lifeboat. No sudden moves, don't crowd the other person, and keep all disastrous thoughts to yourself.") As a thrice-married guy, one feels an obligation to share such insights.

So I found myself in a cab to LaGuardia to catch a plane to Atlanta to give the speech. (I was in New York to speak at the Edith Wharton Society but not about marriage since she had a miserable one.)

[Does anyone know what event this might be? None of the EWS members I've asked know anything about it. Thanks. --Ed. ]

From the Seattle Times:

From page to stage, trying to capture Edith Wharton's Lily

By Misha Berson


Lily Bart, an alluring and eligible woman of 29, is a glittering ornament of the Manhattan "smart set" who catches many a male mogul's wandering eye.

But Lily is no mere "It Girl" of the Gilded Age. She is, in fact, one of the most complicated of American literary protagonists. Ambitious and ambivalent, vain and virtuous, torn and ultimately tragic, she is often a puzzle — to herself, and to others.

Given Lily's beauty and charm, why does happiness escape her? And why, given all her rich admirers, does she end up poor and alone?

Lily's psychological intricacy, in relation to the rigid social strata she inhabits, make Edith Wharton's 1905 book, "The House of Mirth," one of the finest of American novels — and among the hardest to stage or film.

Yet "The House of Mirth" devotees can still dream that Lily's glittering, perilous saga in Old New York will someday translate into satisfying drama.

That hope rises again, with the arrival of a new stage adaptation by British writer Marcus Goodwin. Produced by Book-It Repertory Theatre, and staged by artistic director Jane Jones, it opens Friday at Seattle's Center House Theatre, with gifted actress Jennifer Lee Taylor as Lily.
. . .
Coming up

"The House of Mirth," produced by Book-It Repertory Theatre, previews begin Tuesday, opens Friday and runs through May 13 at Center House Theatre, Seattle Center; $15-$30 (206-216-0833 or www.book-it.org).

From the Mercury News:

Within a few months, I had all the books in hand and had mapped my strategy. Along with each winning work, I would read at least one other book by the author and his or her biography, study criticism and view any film versions. This was going to be a gourmet reading experience.

Speed bump No. 2: Most of the first 10 Pulitzer Prize winners were abysmal. The jurors had lapsed into good taste only once, when they chose Edith Wharton's ``The Age of Innocence.''

Speed bump No. 3: Life and news intervened. On election night 2000, I sat in a St. Petersburg, Fla., hotel room perusing ``Scarlet Sister Mary'' and faced facts. After months of reading and research, I had made it only as far as 1929. The Bush-Gore drama unfolding on television was a whole lot more interesting. I flew back to online news work in Atlanta and put aside the project for 4 1/2 years.

. . . . .
Some books were impossible to read without the main character's metamorphosing into the actor in the movie role. In my mind's eye, Atticus Finch was indistinguishable from Gregory Peck, Newland Archer conjured up Jeremy Irons and Oprah Winfrey was Sethe. It was a reminder that we bring all our experiences to reading.

[Ed. question: When did Jeremy Irons play Newland Archer?]

Buccaneers Miniseries now on DVD

`The Buccaneers' miniseries gets better with age
By R.D. Heldenfels
Akron Beacon Journal

DVD pick of week: When The Buccaneers aired on Masterpiece Theatre in 1995, I called it "a wonderful story of money and class, romantic love and marriages of convenience, of England and the United States."

More than a decade later, the DVD (BBC Video, five parts on one two-sided disc, $14.98) found me liking it even more.

Based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel, the miniseries involved young women trying to succeed in London society after failing to make a dent in America's upper crust.

From InsideBayArea.com (San Francisco)

The Wharton One-Acts" — Valley Shakespeare Festival presents the West Coast premiere of two stage adaptations of Edith Wharton's stories "The Mission of Jane" and "The Promise." Closes Sunday,April 16 at Downtown Yoga, 220-B Division St., Pleasanton. 8 p.m. today and Saturday; 4 p.m. Sunday. $20-$25. (925) 606-6468; http://www.valleyshakes.org.

From Scotsman.com

When the TV companies wheel in experts to talk in hushed tones about art, I rush down to galleries and slash canvases. Not really. Galleries are always closed by that time of night. My favourite buttock-clencher in last night's The Private Life Of An Easter Masterpiece was "The Last Supper creates who we are." That leaves our mothers and fathers out of the picture then. But, luckily, the American novelist Edith Wharton was remembered as keeping it real by saying: "Ever since I first saw that painting I wanted to bash it in the face."

Ethan Frome: An American Romance – a new musical based on the classic 1911 novella by Edith Wharton – will receive its first staged reading at The York Theatre on Tuesday, May 9th at 3 PM and 7:30 PM.

. . .

The York Theatre at St Peter’s is located at 54th St. just east of Lexington Ave. For further information, call 212-935-5820 or visit www.yorktheatre.org.

The House of Mirth Closes Book-It's Season (Broadway World)
http://broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=8780
Lily Bart, the lovely, impoverished and stubbornly single heroine of Edith Wharton's 1905 dark bestseller The House of Mirth, is a character destined for disappointment. Trapped in a society where women are "brought up to be ornamental," she's torn between her desire for a carefree gilded existence and her desire for the unthinkable: a marriage based on love. And unfortunately, at age 29, her shelf life is about to expire. Lily's plight is the heart of Wharton's scathing account of high society, The House of Mirth, which runs April 20 -May 13 at Book-It Repertory Theatre's Center House Theatre.

Adapted by Marcus Goodwin and directed by Jane Jones, The House of Mirth is set in the Gilded Age of 1905 New York, a world of great wealth, great poverty, and more than anything else, great greed.

"The culture that Edith Wharton writes about is very nouveau riche," says Jane Jones, director. "They don't have the experience or grace of knowing how to be rich, of how to act, or how to treat people. There's a lot of measuring up, a ton of greed. They basically eat each other alive. People are terrified of what might happen to them, because things are changing so incredibly fast. Everyone is very guarded about their money and yet they flaunt it shamelessly. They're consumers, in all senses of the word."

Lily Bart is only too aware of her own status as a hot commodity. But her vanity is only one of her fatal flaws. Her naiveté also plays a part in her slow spiral down, as does society's penchant for celebrating and then denigrating its "chosen ones".

"Lily Bart is a celebrity because of her great beauty," says Jones."She's put on this pedestal, but the pedestal is actually a gilded cage; she has no freedom. And unfortunately, once you're on that pedestal, there's only one place to go and that's down. For whatever reason, as a society we celebrate that. Just look at the tabloids where you can read about Jennifer Aniston losing her husband or Lindsey Lohan's drug addiction because she didn't know how to deal with fame and money."

Does that mean Lily Bart is essentially the Jennifer Anniston or Lindsey Lohan of her day?

"Lily Bart is no different,' says Jones. "She's gotten herself into debt through her gambling addiction and she's also addicted to the high life. She's naïve and ignorant as to what the cost of fame and celebrity is, of what it costs to stay in that circle. And if you look at the rich now, nothing's changed. Living in that world costs, sometimes it costs your life."