Edith Wharton An Extraordinary Life - an Illustrated Biography

by Dwight, Eleanor

• ISBN13: 9780810927957
• ISBN10: 0810927950
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-09-01
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams

Summary

American writer Edith Wharton moved through many worlds -- from the "Old New York" of The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country to the Newport of the Gilded Age to the wealthy and creative community at Lenox, Massachusetts. She knew the Italy of American and English expatriates, the salon life of Paris, and France during the Great War. Later she retreated to the French countryside, where she created wonderful houses and gardens that recaptured the ambience of an earlier age. In her writing, Wharton drew continually on her visual and descriptive gifts, interweaving her love of travel, art, architecture, interior design, and gardening with her sensitive, often ironic observations of human nature and the privileged social milieu she knew so well. This biography presents a visual feast -- of photographs, drawings, paintings, postcards, and letters, many never before published -- that captures the life of this extraordinary woman and the time in which she lived.For many years a teacher of literature at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Eleanor Dwight has contributed articles on gardens, travel, and literature to New York, House Beautiful, Harper's Bazaar, and other magazines, and she lectures frequently on the same subjects. She was curator for the 1994 exhibition "Edith Wharton: Glancing Backward", at the National Academy of Design in New York, and cocurator for the 1997-98 exhibition "Portraits of Peoples and Places in Edith Wharton's World" at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

Preface: Edith Wharton's World	7	(5)
An Exile in New York	12	(21)
Newport, ``This Ultra-Frivolous Milieu''	33	(36)
Italy, ``That Sophisticated Landscape''	69	(18)
Lenox: Houses and Gardens	87	(32)
``The Motor-Car Has Restored the Romance of Travel''	119	(22)
A New Life in Paris	141	(38)
The Great War, ``A Calamity Unheard of in Human Annals''	179	(32)
Pavillon Colombe	211	(24)
Hyeres, ``So Warm, So Golden, So Full of Flowers''	235	(26)
Roman Fever	261	(22)
Notes	283	(5)
Chronology	288	(2)
Selected Bibliography	290	(2)
Index	292	(3)
Photograph Credits	295	(1)
Acknowledgments	296