Edith Wharton: A Biography

R. W. B. Lewis's biography follows Edith Wharton from her 1862 birth as Edith Newbold Jones into one of Manhattan's oldest and wealthiest families, her father's own lineage giving rise, by most accounts, to the phrase keeping up with the Joneses, through a childhood of European travel and a mother who forbade her from reading novels until she married. It follows her 1885 marriage to Edward Wharton, a Boston gentleman twelve years her senior whose shared taste for travel gradually gave way, as his mental health declined into a debilitating depression, to a marriage Lewis treats as more companionable than passionate from the start. The biography covers her slow, late blooming emergence as a writer, her first novel not published until she was forty, and the 1905 success of The House of Mirth, which established her as one of the sharpest critics of the same Gilded Age society she had grown up inside.

Lewis gives full weight to the 1908 affair with Morton Fullerton, a Times of London correspondent who offered Wharton the intellectual companionship her marriage had never provided, a relationship that lasted several years before ending and that preceded her 1913 divorce after twenty eight years of marriage; these details, along with her sharp private criticisms of her own mother, were omitted entirely from Wharton's own 1934 autobiography and only became available to biographers when her papers opened at Yale's Beinecke Library in 1968, seven years before Lewis's book appeared. The biography follows her permanent move to France, her decision to remain in Paris through the First World War rather than flee, and her extensive relief work there, opening workrooms for unemployed women, sheltering nearly nine hundred Belgian child refugees, and raising more than one hundred thousand dollars for war relief, work that earned her France's Legion of Honour in 1916. It closes with her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Age of Innocence in 1920, her later years dividing her time between two homes in the French countryside, and her death from a stroke in 1937 at seventy five, buried outside Paris with the honors of both a war hero and a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Lewis draws heavily on the newly opened Beinecke papers to give a fuller account of Wharton's private life than any biography before his had been able to offer.