![]() ![]() Yet Wharton's affection for James was attended by a determination not to be considered his imitator she was convinced that her brand of literary sophistication was of a very different kind from his. They were lifelong friends, travel companions and confidants ever since James sent Wharton an appreciative letter in 1902 about her first full-length novel, The Valley of Decision. ![]() Both wrote about the tribal rituals of America's privileged classes about the encounter of America with Europe about the complex dynamics of power governing relationships between the sexes. James's unquestionable greatness, the inviolability of his fame, has contributed directly and indirectly to the labelling of Wharton as a staid lady novelist of not quite the same calibre. With the proceeds of my next novel I shall have it painted."' A writer's anguished relationship with filthy lucre can seldom have been more subtly (or maliciously) expressed.īut of course James was not just any writer, and the view of Wharton as, in Lee's words, a female Henry James, a more superficial and middlebrow imitator of the Master, using the same kind of plots, characters and society, but with less depth and subtlety, has proved extremely resilient. ![]() Lubbock recalls that Wharton once blithely mentioned that the car in which she was chauffeuring James had been acquired with the proceeds of her last novel: "'With the proceeds of my last novel', said Henry meditatively, 'I purchased a small go-cart, or hand-barrow, on which my guests' luggage is wheeled from the station to my house. ![]() Their friendship, as Hermione Lee suggests in her meticulously detailed biography of Wharton, has become the stuff of literary legend: for many readers and admirers of Edith Wharton, her relationship with Henry James is the main story of her life.* The fact that her books outsold James's in their respective lifetimes - Wharton was, at the pinnacle of her career, the highest earning American novelist - is typically simply seen as proof of his superior sensibility, an inference that James was not averse to promoting. Indeed, for the greater part of the 20th century and several years into this one, Wharton's literary reputation has suffered every bit as much as her personal image, not only from a tendency to mark her down as a society writer but from the long shadow cast by the Master. With friends such as these, what hope was there of an unprejudiced posterity? How little she understood the life of the literary hermit, its dedication to solitude and silence, its sacrifice to its task!" James himself was in the habit of referring to Wharton as a "golden eagle" leading the "Grande Vie", a woman who compulsively spent money and threw lavish entertainments, as he cowered, meanwhile, "like a mere aged British pauper in a work house". Wharton's first memoirist, Percy Lubbock, reinforced the outlines of this shallow caricature in his Portrait of 1947 when he mischievously described his former friend descending on Henry James at Lamb House in Sussex, "with her husband and her motor-car and the rest of her retinue. It is an image that no doubt owes something to that ubiquitous early publicity shot of Wharton, magnificently bouffant in ermine, lace ruffles and pearl choker, perusing some sort of document without deigning to look at the photographer. Elizabeth Lowry sees the American novelist Edith Wharton in a new lightįor the past half century, Edith Wharton has languished in the public perception as an exemplar of a rather stuffy species, now long extinct, of Old New York grande dame, a society hostess who managed to squeeze in satirical exposes of the Fifth Avenue gratin between picnics and jaunts to the opera. ![]()
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