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Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Thursday, 25th January 2007

Now the book is not so very shocking. As Lee points out, its doomed heroine Lily Bart never has sex, she does not blackmail anyone and the overdose she takes is probably an accident. Yet the author hunts her down with unforgiving brutality. This was the age of the novel about ‘the woman who pays’, and Edith was a keen admirer of Flaubert and Hardy. But compared with Emma Bovary, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, let alone Anna Karenina, Lily Bart like Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country is a bit of a clockwork plaything. Edith Wharton does not give her characters much room to breathe — which perhaps is why, as with many novels not quite of the top class, they do so well on stage or screen, where there is a flesh-and-blood bosom to heave with emotion.

Hermione Lee does her best to rescue Edith’s reputation as a writer, deploring ‘the version of Wharton — which has proved extremely hard to shift — as 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’. Well, perhaps she isn’t as deep and subtle as Henry James — but then nor is Henry James. He just hides it better. As often as not, the Master’s beguiling coulis conceals a rather crudely drawn bunch of characters locked into a melodramatic plot, involving stolen fortunes, secret illegitimacies and ripe old incest — though I doubt whether James ever committed anything like Edith’s unpublished (and then unpublishable) pornographic fragment ‘Beatrice Palmato’ — which she proudly describes as ‘an incest donnée up my sleeve that would make them all look like nursery-rhymes’. Donnée! Nice to see James’s favourite fancy term applied to the grossest confection of swelling member and moisture pearling.

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