The mystery of how a wealthy New York socialite became a major American novelist is brilliantly explored in this fascinating critical biography, widely considered to be the most perceptive introduction to Edith Wharton's life and work. This new edition includes two chapters: one on Lily Bart and the lethal stereotypes of women on the nineteenth-century stage, and another on the way Wharton's own sensual awakening led from the frozen austerity of Ethan Frome to the lyricism and tempered happiness of Summer. Everyone who admires Wharton's novels or enjoys the films made from them will want to experience this superb biography.
Great art, like ripe fruit, can only come from a fully mature tree. One that is stunted will only bring forth stunted fruit. Cynthia Griffin Wolff traces the process by which Edith Wharton emerged from such a troubled life to literary triumph. Repressed from her youth, Wharton does battle with the monsters that haunt first the young artist, then the mature woman, to become fully both in the end. Fields's powerful reading is richly seductive and melodic, but careful as well: She deftly shifts intonation slightly between Wharton and Wolff so that the reader never confuses the two. In the end, she reads a satisfying and scholarly portrait of the woman as artist. P.E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
New York Times Book Review...
"Immensely satisfying…reflects a fine understanding of the interior life of a woman writer."
About the Author
CYNTHIA GRIFFIN WOLFF received her Ph.D. in English at Harvard University in 1965 and taught literature for many years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The author of the highly acclaimed biographies Emily Dickinson and Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-century Puritan Character, she holds the 1922 Professorship of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an honorary Board Member of "The Mount," The Edith Wharton Restoration Foundation in Lenox, Masachusetts.
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