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caroline moore Delights in a life of the grandest of literary grandes dames

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20070128
Author:Caroline moore

Edith Wharton

BY HERMIONE LEE

CHATTO & WINDUS, pounds 25, 854 pp T pounds 23 ( pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4115

'No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money'; a woman who does so is doubly open to ridicule. As Hermione Lee shows in this excellent biography, the reputation of the novelist Edith Wharton - a magnificently subtle, passionate and constantly surprising writer - has suffered unfairly, merely because she was born near the top of what she called the 'small, slippery pyramid' of society.

She was born in 1862: her father, George, was a Jones. This may not sound ...

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