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Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Thursday, 25th January 2007

She declared that ‘the most earnest self-searching will not discover in me the least regret for having left America’. Whenever she returned to France, she experienced ‘the usual demoralising happiness’. She never made many French friends, even from her heroic charity work in the first world war, and in the Dreyfus case one of the few French friends she had, the novelist Paul Bourget, took stances that she found repellent, yet she continued to believe that the French as a nation had ‘a moral taste’ that was denied to Americans. French civilisation was ‘so much older, richer, more elaborate and firmly crystallised’.

Which left her in something of a moral bind, one that she never quite admitted to herself. Not merely was her unearned income sweated from the brows of her uncivilised countrymen, her earned income came out of their pockets. From her first great success, The House of Mirth, published in 1905 when she was in her early forties, to her late sixties, she never ceased to be a bestseller and most of her readers were in America. In 1928 alone, her total earnings from serialisation, advances, royalties and film rights were over $95,000. And she was happily complicit with the whole machinery of publicity that helped to deliver these enormous dividends. Lee reproduces a marvellous ad for The Age of Innocence with a picture of a distraught society girl next to the headline ‘Was She Justified In Seeking A Divorce?’ The book was serialised in Pictorial Review, sandwiched between ads for Rust-Resistant Corsets and Odorono (‘She Had Overlooked One Weakness: Perspiration’). Even the lofty house of Scribner had been happy to put on the wrapper of The House of Mirth ‘For the first time the veil has been lifted from New York Society’— and the book sold 140,000 copies in its first year.

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