Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004
Passionate Pilgrim
By Hermione Lee
The Cruise of the Vanadis
by Edith Wharton, with photographs by Jonas Dovydenas
Rizzoli, 223 pp., $27.95
'Pussy Jones,' a well-brought-up member of that upper-class New York clan whose surname was supposed to have lent itself to the phrase 'keeping up with the Joneses,' was married to a Bostonian gentleman of leisure, Edward Wharton, when she was twenty-three, in 1885. Mrs. Edith Wharton—as she then became—would publish her first, coauthored, book at thirty-five, in 1897, and her first book of stories two years later. In those twelve years, she constructed a life, as a married woman of her class, which was as interesting, gregarious, and adventurous as she could make it; and she began to feel her way as a writer, publishing poems and stories and articles from the late 1880s onward.
Review, 3192 words
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