The Michael King memorial lecture
Hermione Lee characterised biography readers as “greedy readers with an insatiable appetite”. Her biography of Edith Wharton at over 800 pages would represent using that analogy a very hearty three course meal. The biography took seven years to research and write and following in the Wharton footsteps involved Lee in travel to Italy, France, England and New York.
Lee accessed Wharton’s diaries, letters, notebooks, unfinished works, her library and annotated books and also made use of Wharton’s two autobiographies. There are however many gaps in the archive, few family letters and very little about her unhappy marriage. As the research progressed Lee felt she grew to like and admire Wharton more and more; her humour, her stoicism and the variety of her tone.
Lee particularly enjoyed reading Wharton’s notebook of oneliners and compared Wharton’s witty epigrams to Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward.
Wharton, like Katherine Mansfield, made great use in her novels of her childhood, her family and upper middle-class society. She unpicks the manners and mores, dinners, clubs, hotels, decoration, her novels read like a guide to society but were always digging deeper. Her world of the 1860s-1890s was a narrow world, but one where great change was afoot, the old elites were being challenged by new money and new values.
Hermione Lee talked about how Wharton has been reassessed and reshaped by different generations of biographers. Wharton fell off the radar between 1930-1970, but has been viewed as a New York society snob, a victimed wife, an abused child etc. Lee herself tries to avoid simple labelling, seeing Wharton as a complex, evasive character but a very modern woman.
Lee’s biography has opened the latest door, letting Edith Wharton out of the stuffy drawing rooms of the late 1800s and into the modern age.
