The letters of Edith Wharton 9780671699659, 0671699652, 9780684185859, 0684185857

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R.W B. LEWIS & NANCY LEWIS

The Letters of Edith Wharton edited by R. W. B. Lewis, VVharion's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and Nancy Lewis, ranks as a major literary event, bringing into full and dramatic f(K us one of the most gifted and enduring authors ,

modern era. From the more than

of the

4.000

letters

that

have

survived, the editors have selected approximately 100 letters for inc lusion in this

from a

letter

written

volume. Ranging

when Wharton was

twelve to

penned just a few days before her death, the collection shows Wharton at her epistolary best and most c haracterislic and in all the striking

a letter

variety of her

many

voices.

A

product of the great age of letter writing, Wharton wrote an average of six letters a day throughout her adult life. Her style could oscillate between the literary and the friendly, the consciously composed and the gossipy, depending upon her mood and her correspondent. Some of her letters concerned purely professional matters or dealt with household crises. Others

CLAIRE LE CHATEAU H YE RES (VAR)

upon her great erudition, her knowledge of languages, her intimate familiarity with the classics of ancient and modern literature and general cultural history. Among Wharton's longtime friends and correspondents were Bernard Berenson, the distinguished Italian Renaissance art connoisseur called five

and

and the novelist Henry James. James destroyed most of Wharton's letters,

historian,

Sadly,

but the few that survive are among the best she wrote, and James is mentioned often and lovingly in

Wharton's

letters

to

mutual

friends.

The

extensive Berenson correspondence has survived

and forms an important and illuminating part of this collectic^n, as do letters to Sara Norton, daughter of Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton, and Gaillard Lapsley, the American don of medieval history at Cambridge University. Among the letters published here is the corresix)ndence with the American journalist Morton Fullertc^n. Wharton met Fullerton, a writer for the London Times in Paris, in 1907. Their attraction soon progressed to intense emotional and physical intimacy. Edith Wharton's letters to her lover form an extraordinary record of an affair that led from passion and fulfillment to torment and grief. For years, sc holars assumed that the corresp)ondence had been destroyed. But in 1980, 300 of Wharton's letters to Fullerton mysteriously came on the market. With the exception of 26 letters (Continued on back flap)

S84 PARK AVENUE.

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hateau, Hyeres, France: the approach.

Beinecke Library, Yale University.

I

The

terrace ofSainte-Claire. Beineche Library, Yale University.

The

salon

at

Sainte-Claire. Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Philomene de LevisMirepoix, around 1925. Berenson Archives, Villa I Tattu Florence,

Italy.

Lady Sybil Cutting

at Villa

Medici, mid-i920s. Berenson Archives, Villa

I Tatn,

Florence, Italy.

^

The

Osprey^ a steam yacht rented by Edith Wharton for a ten-week cruise through the Aegean, spring 1926. Beineche Library, Yale University.

Catharine Gross, Edith Wharton's lifelong friend

and housekeeper, 1930.

Beineche Library, Yale University.

Edith Wharton, 1930. Beinecke Library, Yale University.

^

Edith

Wharton with Lady Wemyss, H. G. Wells

(foreground, right),

and an

unidentified man. Beineche Library, Yale Universm.

Robert Norton and Edith Wharton on

a picnic near

Beineche Library, Yale University.

Hyeres, early 1930s.

^

Beatrix Farrand at SainteClaire, 1934. Beineckc Library, Yale University.

Kenneth Clark at Saltwood Castle, around 1950. Berenson Archives, Villa I Tatti, Florence, Italy.

Gaillard Lapsley in his study, 1937. Berenson Archives, Villa I

Edith Wharton's JVilliam

last letter, to

Royall Tyler

Collection,

Tatti, Florence, Italy.

Matilda Gay, August

4, 1937.

Lily Library, University ofIndiana.

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