A rich new life of a great novelist. The
first biography of Edith Wharton by a British woman writer, it challenges the
accepted view, showing Wharton's lifelong ties to Europe and displaying her as
a tough, erotically brave, startlingly modern writer and woman.
The name 'Edith Wharton' conjures up
'Gilded Age' New York ,
in all its snobbery and ruthlessness - the world of The Age of Innocence and
The House of Mirth. This major new biography upsets the stereotype. This Edith
Wharton is not the genteel, nostalgic chronicler of a vanished age but a
fiercely modern author, writing of sex, love, money and war - a woman of strong
convictions and conflicting ambitions and desires.
Born in 1862 during the Civil War, Wharton
broke away from her wealthy background and travelled extensively and
adventurously in Europe, eventually settling in Paris . During the First World War she
committed herself heroically to war-work and lived in France , her
'second country', until her death in 1937. She created fabulous homes in New
England and France ,
and her life was filled with remarkable friends, including Henry James, Bernard
Berenson, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She ran her professional life with
energy, writing on her travels and on Italian villas and gardens, and
publishing poetry, plays, essays and short stories as well as her powerful
novels. But Wharton had her secrets, including a passionate secret mid-life
love affair. She was unhappily married, childless and divorced, and knew
loneliness and anguish. Her brilliant, disturbing fiction shows her deep
understanding of the longing and struggle in women's lives.
This masterly biography delves into every
aspect of Wharton's extraordinary life-story. It shifts the emphasis towards Europe and places her more clearly than ever before in
her social context and her history. In particular, it shows in fascinating
detail how she worked and what lies at the heart of her magnificent and subtle
books.
Untidying
the drawing-room
Edith Wharton may have repudiated the
customs of her country, but it provided material for her masterpieces. Elaine
Showalter reviews Hermione Lee's biography
Elaine Showalter
The Guardian, Saturday 10 February 2007 / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/10/biography.classics
Edith Wharton
by Hermione Lee
853pp, Chatto & Windus, £25
In her memoir, A Backward Glance (1934),
Edith Wharton recalled her first attempts at writing when she was 11 years old.
Her fledgling novel began: "Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown? ... If only I
had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room."
But when little Edith shyly offered it to her mother, the stately New York matron Lucretia
Newbold Jones, the response was chilly and withering: "Drawing-rooms are
always tidy."
The anecdote is a favourite of Wharton's
biographers, and Hermione Lee quotes it early in her monumentally conceived and
impressively executed study of Wharton's life and times. All the seeds of
Wharton's work and psyche are contained therein - her fascination with the
ethnography of upper-class societies from old New York to the Parisian faubourg, and her
obsession with interior décor and its suggestive symbolism of the pristine
female body. Throughout her life, Wharton struggled to free her subversive
imagination from the bonds imposed upon her by her past. Most sensationally,
she had a passionate affair at the age of 46 with a younger American
journalist, Morton Fullerton, and left her accounts of it for posterity to
discover, a fact first revealed by RWB Lewis in his 1975 biography. In novels
such as Summer (1917), she explored the issues of erotic tension in unhappy
marriages, while a manuscript fragment, "Beatrice Palmato", is an
explicit, almost pornographic, account of father-daughter incest. (Lee calls it
"lush and dated", and wryly notes that "reticence has its stylistic
advantages".)
Wharton had a late start as a novelist,
becoming a professional writer in her late 30s. But she was disciplined and
productive, publishing 48 books, including collections of short stories,
novellas, poems, essays, travel writing and literary criticism. How should a
biographer find a key to a writer so varied? Lee approaches Wharton as "an
American in Paris ",
a writer who broke away from the roots of her own American upbringing to live
abroad, and whose deepest connections were to European culture and European
values. In her work and life, Wharton repudiated the customs of her country,
including the slangy sounds of her mother-tongue. "My first weeks in America are always miserable," she wrote to
her friend Sally Norton upon one return from France in 1903. " ... All of
which outburst is due to my first sight of American streets, my first hearing
of American voices, & the wild, disheveled, backwoods look of everything
when one first comes home!" The following year, her alienation had increased:
"A whole nation developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas
for breakfast." How a country she found so aesthetically abrasive,
intellectually uncongenial and culturally primitive could in fact be Wharton's
"home", and how her cultural exile formed her literary art, are among
the themes Lee pursues in this comprehensive and insightful book.
Acknowledged in the last few decades as a
major American writer, and newly popular since the filming of several of her
novels, Wharton has been the subject of many biographical studies, critical
revisions and ideological controversies. She has been described as a woman who
hated women; a survivor of childhood sexual abuse; the victim of an unstable
and deceitful husband and a painful divorce; a neurasthenic who was treated by
the notorious rest-cure specialist Dr Silas Weir Mitchell. Lee rejects all of
these labels as unproven - there is no evidence for abuse, for example - or
oversimplified. None comes close to explaining her genius, and they underestimate
her "toughness and resolve". Lee also gives relatively short shrift
to more recent, politically charged critiques of Wharton's snobbery, racism and
anti-semitism. She frankly notes the blunt references to "Yids" and
other racial and ethnic slurs in Wharton's letters (deleted or omitted by early
editors), but places them against the richer, more complex and contradictory
contexts of the fiction.
Lee is out to understand Wharton, not to
vilify or sanctify her. She gives a much fuller account of Wharton's working
methods than anyone has before, looking at manuscript revisions, and at
Wharton's many tantalisingly unfinished stories and novels. She seems to have
read everything Wharton wrote, and all that has been written about her; and she
is a discriminating and generous critic who offers full, fresh and incisive
discussions of all the novels and scores of the short stories. She traces
Wharton's strenuous intellectual self-formation, from her early reading of
Darwin, Spencer, Nietzsche, Huxley, Frazer and Veblen, to her mature studies of
European painting and art. She delicately untangles the psychological and
literary intricacies of Wharton's friendship with Henry James, who both was and
was not her Master and mentor in the novel, and whose influence she both
cherished and derided. Wharton's generously intended but sometimes botched
schemes to funnel money to James, the social geometry of her friendships and
rivalries with James's homosexual and bisexual circle at Howard Sturgis's
English country house Qu'Acre, his serio-comic efforts to resist her powerful
personality (he called her the Firebird and the Eagle) and her futile efforts
to escape being pigeon-holed as his imitator and heiress make this an
inexhaustibly fascinating subject for analysis. Lee also pays close attention
to Wharton's often overlooked work for France
in the first world war, her many books and efforts on behalf of the French
cause and her anger, outrage and shame regarding US foreign policy before America entered
the war.
To the French, Lee points out, Wharton was
"an American who loved France
and whose novels brilliantly explained America to the French". She
was also admired, and felt at home, in England , where she once hoped to
buy a great country house. But her self-created, self-aggrandising position as
the exceptional American abroad, the anti-American American, also had its
pitfalls for her art. Lee calls The Custom of the Country (1913) her greatest
novel, rightly praising it as "tightly themed, highly controlled".
But Lee could say more about the limitations of Wharton's ferocious attack on
American capitalism, consumerism and acquisitiveness. Custom is also Wharton's
most obtuse statement about the promise of democracy. Her anti-heroine Undine
Spragg is indeed avaricious, ruthless and vain, a midwestern Becky Sharp; but
Wharton also mocks Undine's lack of sensitivity to class distinctions, and
absence of religious prejudice, as signs of provincial ignorance. When a French
aristocrat denounces Undine, he also condemns an entire pioneer nation:
"You come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper,
where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are
demolished before they are dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we
are of holding on to what we have." Although Wharton had travelled
extensively in England , France , Italy ,
Germany and north Africa,
she had seen little of the United States
beyond New England and New York .
In the decades that followed, she would retell and reframe her expatriate story
of "nostalgia and distaste", while other American novelists such as
Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson were exploring the dreams and tragedies of
the inhabitants of those small towns.
In her book Body Parts: Writing About
Lives, Lee discusses the problems of ending biographies, particularly dealing
with the subject's death; should it be milked for pathos and meaning or
understated? She de-dramatises Wharton's death from a stroke in August 1937.
But she also chooses to end her lengthy biography with an anecdote, rather than
a considered summing-up and celebration of Wharton's literary achievement, and
in the absence of a critical conclusion, that anecdote bears a lot of weight.
In her final pages, Lee describes her pilgrimage to Wharton's "plain,
rather ugly" grave outside Versailles :
"The tomb was covered with weeds, old bottles, and a very ancient pot of
dead flowers. Clearly no one had been there for a long time." To Lee, the
untended, unvisited grave suggests the anomaly and the cost of Wharton's
permanent exile and deracination. In the rain, she "weeded Edith" and
decorated her grave with a silk azalea bought from the cemetery flower-shop.
"She would probably have been scornful about the artificial flower, but
would, I felt, have been glad to have her grave tidied up." In this
diminishing and muted ending, one hears the echo of Lucretia Newbold Jones:
"Graves are always tidy." But neither Wharton nor the reader should
have cause for complaint.
New show: Julian Fellowes, pictured at The
Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, the estate of Edith Wharton, who will likely
star in his drama for NBC on the Gilded Age in New York
|
NBC
signs 'Downton Abbey' creator for U.S.
period drama focusing on the fortunes of 'the princes of the American
Renaissance' during the Gilded Age in New
York
'The Gilded Age' could air as early as Fall
2013
Era was marked by the rise of industry,
invention and finance from the late 1800s to the early 1900s
Characterized by J.P. Morgan, Andrew
Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt - as well as the
Astor family
By HELEN POW
PUBLISHED: 28 November 2012 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239593/NBC-signs-Downton-Abbey-creator-Julian-Fellowes-US-period-drama-New-Yorks-Gilded-Age.html
The first two seasons of British period
drama 'Downton Abbey' have taken U.S.
audiences by storm, and plans are now in place for America to receive a period drama
of its own.
And now, just six weeks out from series
three, NBC has signed its Oscar-winning creator, Julian Fellowes, to come up
with a show based on America 's
past.
Set in late 19th century New York City, 'The Gilded Age' will follow
the lives of 'the princes of the American Renaissance, and the vast fortunes they
made - and spent.'
The new television drama will be produced
by the NBC Universal television studio and could be on the air as early as Fall
2013.
'This was a vivid time with dizzying,
brilliant ascents and calamitous falls, of record-breaking ostentation and
savage rivalry,' Mr Fellowes said in a statement.
Lavish: Mansions, like the one belonging to
Cornelius Vanderbilt, sprung up along Fifth
Avenue at the height of the Gilded Age
'(It was) a time when money was king.'
The Gilded Age in New York was marked by the rise of industry,
invention and transportation.
The era was personified in bankers J.P.
Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
They were the business pioneers who became America 's first
millionaires after founding steel, oil and finance.
As lavish mansions sprung up along Fifth Avenue , the
Gilded Age was also the time when the Astor family rose to prominence,
eventually becoming 'the landlords of New
York .'
The famed Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Manhattan ’s Astor
Place and the Astoria
neighborhood of Queens are just a few of the
locations that continue to carry the Astor name.
NBC reportedly passed up 'Downton Abbey' at
the start, believing the costume drama wouldn't appeal to American viewers.
The glorified soap opera follows the
aristocratic Crawley family; their romances,
tragedies and endless struggles of the manor's many servants.
The commercial and critical success of
'Downton Abbey' has been huge since it graced U.S. screens two years ago.
It has won six Emmy awards, including two
for Fellowes and two for Dame Maggie Smith, who plays Violet Crawley, Dowager
Countess of Grantham.
According to the New York Post, the show's
second season was the most watched series ever with its February 5, 2012
episode rated No. 2 at 9pm behind the Super Bowl.
The program has been sent up on 'Saturday
Night Live' and by late night host Jimmy Fallon as well as inspiring scores of
YouTube videos.
Mr Fellowes will continue working on
'Downton Abbey,' which has been renewed for a fourth season.
'THE GILDED ERA': HOW GROWTH OF RAILROADS
AND INDUSTRY SAW THE U.S.
PROSPER IN LATE 19TH CENTURY
In United States history, the Gilded
Age was the period following the Civil War, running from 1877 to 1893 when the
next era began, the Progressive Era.
The term was coined by writers Mark Twain
and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, satirizing what
they believed to be an era of serious social problems hidden by a thin layer of
gold.
The Gilded Age was a time of enormous
growth as the United States
jumped to the lead in industrialisation ahead of Britain .
The economic boom attracted millions from Europe . Railroads were the major industry, but the
factory system, coal mining, and labor unions also gained in importance.
During the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy
rose at the fastest rate in its history, with real wages, wealth, GDP, and
capital formation all increasing rapidly.
Capitalizing on the economic boom were America 's first
millionaires like J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt - now
regarded as the first success stories in the steel, oil and finance industries.
And they weren't the only flourishing
industries.
Between 1865 and 1898, the output of wheat
increased by 256 per cent, corn by 222 per cent, coal by 800 per cent and miles
of railway track by 567 per cent.
The growth was interrupted by a major
nationwide depression known as the Panic of 1893.
Julian Fellowes to create 'American Downton'
set in 1880s New York
The Gilded
Age' series is expected to reference the Vanderbilt family and will feature
'princes of the American Renaissance'
ADAM
SHERWIN Author Biography Wednesday 28 November 2012 / http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/julian-fellowes-to-create-american-downton-set-in-1880s-new-york-8364183.html
When Julian
Fellowes offered Downton Abbey to the NBC network he was told that American
viewers would never sit through an Edwardian-era period drama.
But the
broadcaster has had a change of heart after US
viewers fell for the series and now Fellowes will create an “American Downton”
for NBC, set in 19th century New York .
Three years
after sending the Oscar-winning screenwriter packing, NBC has asked Fellowes to
put an American twist on the British show, which has won 6 Emmy awards and
posted record ratings for the PBS network.
The Gilded
Age, the working title for the new show, will be set in New York City in the 1880s and focus on the
rising, and inevitably plunging, fortunes of “the princes of the American
Renaissance,” according to the network.
Fellowes,
who will be executive producer, said: “This was a vivid time, with dizzying,
brilliant ascents and calamitous falls, of record-breaking ostentation and
savage rivalry; a time when money was king.”
Jennifer
Salke, President of NBC Entertainment, says the network was “thrilled” to have
the “immensely talented” Fellowes on board. “Having him on our team represents
a major creative coup,” she added. The network, which hopes to get the show,
produced by the Universal Television studio, on air next Autumn, promises a
“sweeping epic”.
Historians
define the Gilded Age as the boom period following the Civil War, running from
1877 to 1893.
Coined by
writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their book, The Gilded Age: A
Tale of Today, it was an era of huge economic growth for the United States, as
new railroads connected the vast country, scarred by political corruption and
social inequalities which followed industrialisation.
Fellowes’
series is expected to reference the Vanderbilts, the family which attained huge
wealth through railroads and shipping in the 19th century, becoming “New York royalty”
through their social standing in the city.
Fellowes,
who will continue to write Downton Abbey, shook up the ITV drama this year with
the introduction of New York millionairess Martha Levinson, played by Shirley
MacLaine (pictured above with the Dowager Countess played by Maggie Smith), as
the mother of Lady Cora. However speculation that The Gilded Age might act as a
“prequel” to the British show, which has now reached the mid-1920s, appears
premature.
The NBC
network is under new management since executives rejected Downton Abbey. Period
dramas traditionally do not fare well in US prime-time slots, which are
dominated by high-volume, crime procedurals.
But
although it screens on the PBS cable network, which picked up the series when
NBC passed, Downton has built an audience of 5 million viewers and become a
national talking-point, spawning “Dress like Downton” segments on US breakfast
television and a range of unofficial merchandise, including a “Lady Cora pearl
set”.
The Gilded
Age is set to compete against another US
series based on the snobbery and rituals of a closed, New York , high society. Teen drama Gossip
Girl is inspired by The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s 1870-set novel
chronicling Manhattan ’s
wealthy classes.
Fellowes
will take Downton into a new era following the news that Dan Stevens, who plays
Matthew Crawley, will leave during the fourth series. The actor is currently
appearing on Broadway and says he wishes to pursue new opportunities in New York .
ITV is to
launch a new big-budget period drama next year. Set in the early 1900s, Jeremy
Piven takes the title role in Mr Selfridge, the story of the visionary American
founder of the London
retail department store.
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