Edith Wharton / Lee Hermione

"This is a Borzoi Book"--T.p. verso.

Originally published: London : Chatto & Windus, c2007.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [765]-835) and index.

An American in Paris -- Making up -- Pussy Jones -- Italian backgrounds -- The Decoration of Houses -- The republic of letters -- Obligations -- The legend -- Friends in England -- Mme. Warthon -- L'Ame close -- La demanderesse -- Getting what you want -- Fighting France -- Une seconde patrie -- Pavillon/Chateau -- The Age of Innocence -- Jazz -- A private library -- All souls' -- Edith Wharton's family tree.

"The definitive biography of one of America's greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf." "Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Hermione Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton - tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction." "Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society that included Bernard Berenson, Aldous Huxley and most famously Henry James, who here emerges more as peer than as master. Wharton's life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her: unhappily married and childless, her one brush with passion came and went in midlife, an affair vividly, intimately recounted here." "Lee interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography."--BOOK JACKET.