Sunday 7 September 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill
Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests


Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,
Ferdinand Mount
Thursday, 25th January 2007

She always had a strong moral streak. Before she wrote fiction when she made her name as a writer on gardens and interior décor, she lapped up everything that Ruskin and American gardeners and landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, had to say about the morality of taste. It was partly because her moral views were so hard and clear that her American readers never stopped adoring her, though she never pretended to love them. For she remained, au fond as she would have said, very American.

Since Percy Lubbock’s spiteful sketch, A Portrait of Edith Wharton, there have been two fine full-length lives of her. Lewis is better on her American background and her marriage, Lee on her European wanderings and her books. But both leave you fond of the dauntless old thing, with her large chin and her big hands and feet and her unruly stook of red hair and her love of books and beauty. An easy person to guy, and Henry James did it over and over again in his letters and stories, but he never got her down. In old age she warmed towards the Church she had always distrusted as the enemy of human love, and on her now neglected tombstone in the Protestant cemetery at Versailles she asked to have inscribed, ‘O Crux Ave Spes Unica’, but what it really ought to say is ‘She Gave As Good As She Got.’

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