KEY POINTS:
Edith Wharton once compared a woman's life to "a great house full of rooms".
This is a tempting framework for any biographer, and one that Wharton's latest, Hermione Lee, uses to striking effect in her new book about the American writer, famous for portraying Old New York's "Gilded Age".
Wharton was passionate about house and garden design, and published her first book on the subject.
She decorated two homes in Newport, Rhode Island, following her ill-fated marriage at 23 to the charming but mentally unstable Teddy Wharton, before moving to the residence that Henry James described as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond."
The restlessness with which she undertook these renovations was a product of Wharton's furious energy and also reflected her lifelong feeling of being an outsider.
As Hermione Lee suggests, the essential tension in Edith Wharton's work stems from her being held in a world in which she remains ever the watchful stranger.
But Wharton also appreciated the idea of a house full of rooms as a metaphor for what lay mysterious and unexposed to the outside world about her own life.
In a short story, published more than a decade before she struck success in 1905 with The House of Mirth, her first bestseller, she described an "innermost room, the holy of holies" in which "the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes".
Unlike Wharton's philistine husband who, in this figurative scheme, never got beyond the family sitting-room, Lee pursues her subject down every winding corridor.
Her book's major emphasis is no longer on the grande dame but on the woman who felt she hadn't been loved enough; the Edith Wharton who had an intense mid-life affair and confided her feelings about it to a secret journal, whose writing about sex is often erotically charged, and whose most shocking act, perhaps, was to draft the beginnings of a story about a father making love to his willing daughter, described in the most graphic terms.
The time is ripe for a new biography of this intimacy and on this scale. Her work had fallen into some disfavour but a real boom came when Hollywood scented Wharton's potential for movies.
As the end of the century approached, one Wharton film succeeded another: Ethan Frome, The Buccaneers , The House of Mirth and a lush Martin Scorsese production of The Age of Innocence.
But this surge of interest has had its negative side. Wharton is now perceived as a symbol for status, and for all the values associated with exclusive New York society.
She was undoubtedly born into this world, in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, and grew up inside a highly regulated social system. But she turned a critical and satirical eye on it - and spent more of her life in Europe than America.
Wharton's most famous novel, The Age of Innocence, published in 1921, set in the New York of her upbringing, expresses a sense of alienation from the United States.
It may possess a nostalgic glow in its mourning over a vanished world; but, as Lee points out, there is also an implied attack on "the hypocrisy, philistinism and resentful narrow-mindedness of her parents' generation".
Her empathy stretched much further, to the portrayal of the American rural working class in works like Ethan Frome and Summer, and the problems of industrialisation in The Fruit of the Tree.
Lee says that Wharton was clearly "a material girl", but describes her version of the woman as "less genteel and more modern".
As a biographer, Lee is, like her subject, both hot and cold. Her critical exploration of Wharton's work is dazzlingly assured.
While Lee's book might have disappointed Wharton on one count: its excessive length. She would have thought it too "loosely built", its other qualities would have impressed.
* Published by Chatto and Windus
- INDEPENDENT
