Edith Wharton
by Hermione Lee
Chatto & Windus, ₤25, 853 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20

An 853-page biography is one of the most handsome compliments posterity can pay an author. Is Edith Wharton worth that acreage of print and scholarship?

The life is fascinating: even more so is the Whartonian lifestyle. What stands out from Hermione Lee’s pages is the extraordinary wealth of the “Leisure Class” into which Edith Jones was born (and which, in her later fiction, she anatomises as precisely as did her favourite sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who invented the term). Her immediate family was not quite among the fabled New York “400” upper-crust families. Their riches were not “embarrassing”, but they were well within the privileged enclave. The young Edith was spared from the need ever to work by a bequest from a distant relative that left her, in modern currency values, a millionairess for life.

Edith Wharton, as she became, was raised in a milieu of opulent furniture and emotional frigidity. When she was 11, she “timorously” showed her mother the opening of a story she had written in which a Mrs Tompkins says to a Mrs Brown, “If only I had known you were going to call I would have tidied up the drawing-room.” Mrs Jones’s “icy” rebuke to her daughter was, “Drawing-rooms are always tidy.”

Wharton was tutored at home, in tidy drawing-rooms. Thereafter, she taught herself in libraries. This education served her well. In her prime she was able to hold her own in salon conversation with Henry James and Andre Gide - even addressing the latter in French.

Bustled into marriage with a philistine mate, Wharton endured 28 years before divorcing him. The union was probably sexless. Wharton’s fulfilling relationships were with friends as cultured as she had made herself. Her husband, “Teddy”, did not fall into that category. His congenital dimness was compounded by late-onset congenital madness. He casts a paler shadow on Lee’s narrative than his wife’s lap-dogs (Lee has dug up a wonderful photograph of Wharton with a couple of pooches draped round her neck like a fox fur).

For the better part of her life, Wharton would be half-rooted in upper-class New York, while physically resident in France, where she died, in 1937. Contemplating her grown-over grave, Lee sees her as “part ‘perpetuelle’ inhabitant, part stranger in exile”.

The grass does not grow over Wharton’s literary reputation. It has boomed. Three causes suggest themselves. In the 1960s, private papers were released for the benefit of R.W.B. Lewis’s authorised biography. Lewis spilled exciting details about Wharton’s adulterous fling, in middle age, with the “bounder” Morton Fullerton. “You are dazzling... You are beautiful... But you’re not kind,” observed Henry James - whose heart may also have been a little broken by the caddish young man. There was more exciting stuff in Wharton’s unpublished sketch “Beatrice Palmato”, with its breathtakingly graphic (and outrageously erotic) description of a father’s rape of his daughter. There were, manifestly, raging fires beneath the Whartonian ice. Looking beneath the surface of novels such as Ethan Frome, contemporary readers are privileged to see them in ways their predecessors were not.

Wharton has also been a beneficiary of the post-1960s feminist criticism. Lee is sympathetic to this revisionary line, and offers congenial analyses of the major works. Additionally, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence has done more to put Wharton’s fiction on bookshop shelves than all the professors in America.

Lee is, as her publisher proclaims, the “first British woman biographer” and she is clearly exercised to rescue Edith from “gallant male biographers” (Lewis is not named, but clearly indicated). And to rescue her from the dismissive and ubiquitous prejudice that she is just “Henrietta James”. Lee goes a step further and suggests that far from being his pupil, “The Master” may have picked up some of his good things from Edith Wharton.

Wharton destroyed all her intimate correspondence. Denied this straw for her bricks, Lee reconstructs Wharton’s physical world (notably her houses), her intellectual cultural world, and her social world(s) in fine detail. It is done brilliantly.

Anyone embarking on a reading of Wharton will deny themselves full appreciation if they do not consult Lee, whose biography is now the necessary accompaniment. And, yes, Wharton is worth it.

John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London