Volume 25, Number 2 · February 23, 1978
Edith Wharton's Secret
By Karl Miller
A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton
by Cynthia Griffin Wolff
Oxford University Press, 453 pp., $15.95
Edith Wharton's best work belongs to the period of fifteen years which ended in 1920. Just before the turn of the century, she suffered a spell of nervous exhaustion—of asthma, nausea, and depression—in which a troubled childhood, and a distaste for her marriage to Teddy Wharton, can be perceived. Confinement within an unhappy marriage formed part of her confinement within what survived, as much did, of Old New York—her name for the world of her childhood. She has described this as the world of the hereditary rich in that city, infiltrated by the new industrial fortunes, of matrons who believed in an undefiled and ceremonious past, of dry old male celibates, propped by the fireside like wooden Indians, who remembered and related such a past, and could speak of laxities condoned in the Faubourg St. Germain. Miss Edith Jones had an engagement knocked over by jealousies among the contending rich, and she was then let down by a man who went on to become a distinguished snob, and her dearest friend, Walter Berry. Then there was the eligible Teddy Wharton. From the confinements of wealth and caste, however, and of a suitable marriage, she was to imagine and to execute certain escapes.
Review, 7250 words
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