A rich and powerful new life of a great novelist. The first biography by a British woman writer, it overturns the accepted view, displaying her as a tough, erotically brave, startlingly modern writer. Much more than the biography of Wharton for our generation - it is a touchstone in the art of the biographer, a must for everyone who cares about the period
Hermione Lee's previous books include the internationally acclaimed biography Virginia Woolf, a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts, and a study of Elizabeth Bowen. She is a well-known reviewer and broadcaster, and, in 2006, Chair of the judges for the Man-Booker Prize. She is the first woman Goldsmiths' Professor of English at Oxford University, a Fellow of New College Oxford, of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. She was awarded a CBE in 2003 for services to literature.
"A superb biography" -- Colm Toibin Irish Times "Adding impressive depth and nuance to the received portrait of Wharton, Lee's biography excels in its discussions of her writing" -- Peter Kemp The Sunday Times "Painstaking and elegant... One of this book's great pleasures is Lee's discussion of Wharton's work" -- Kasia Boddy Daily Telegraph "A feat of exhaustive research...finely tuned to Wharton's creative achievement. This is a glorious biography" -- Mark Bostridge Independent on Sunday "[A] majestically weighty autobiography as meticulous, exhaustive and exhausting in scope and scale as its subject" -- Hilary Spurling Observer
"A superb biography" -- Colm Toibin Irish Times "Adding impressive depth and nuance to the received portrait of Wharton, Lee's biography excels in its discussions of her writing" -- Peter Kemp The Sunday Times "Painstaking and elegant... One of this book's great pleasures is Lee's discussion of Wharton's work" -- Kasia Boddy Daily Telegraph "A feat of exhaustive research...finely tuned to Wharton's creative achievement. This is a glorious biography" -- Mark Bostridge Independent on Sunday "[A] majestically weighty autobiography as meticulous, exhaustive and exhausting in scope and scale as its subject" -- Hilary Spurling Observer
Lee (English, Oxford Univ.) has already tackled several prominent women modernists in her scholarly biographies of Virginia Woolf (1997) and Willa Cather (1990). Here, she presents an exhaustively researched and incredibly detailed biography of American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937). Drawing on previously unavailable sources, Lee succeeds in eclipsing R.W.B. Lewis's excellent eponymous Wharton biography of 1975. Her conscientious research and attunement to her subject render a three-dimensional portrait of this complex woman. Wharton defied the conventions of her time and station in life to live an unusual and productive life, authoring numerous novels and short stories and becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for a novel (The Age of Innocence, 1921). Lee teases out the ways in which Wharton's personal life-her unhappy marriage to a sportsman husband with no intellectual interests; her short, mid-life affair with "frightful bounder" Morton Fullerton; her ambiguous relationship to society-informed her writing, adding to our understanding of both the woman and her literary output. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.-Alison M. Lewis, Drexel Univ. Lib., Philadelphia Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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