The Literature Network - THE AGE OF WHARTON Decades later, we still don't know quite what to make of America's preeminent novelist of manners

THE AGE OF WHARTON Decades later, we still don't know quite what to make of America's preeminent novelist of manners

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 19931003
Author:Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Intimately familiar with lap dogs, ballroom dinners and the vast domain between day lilies and roses, Edith Wharton wrote despite these privileges rather than because of them. She knew all about divorce and mental illness, too -- she was no stranger to depression, and her husband suffered it for years -- and about the small, ongoing humiliations heaped on her by provincial New York for her literary aspirations. Born into an effete aristocracy corrupted far more by softness than indecency, only within the frisson of literature did Wharton find the liberation (and irony) she so required. One ...

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THE AGE OF WHARTON Decades later, we still don't know quite what to make of America's preeminent novelist of manners

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