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Edith Wharton

Intolerable, unstoppable, indispensable

Hermione Lee
Chatto, 854pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Thursday, 25th January 2007

Why did she have to wait until she was 47 years old for all this? After all Teddy, was charming, gentle, as fond of animals as she was, and the best-looking man in the Harvard class of ’73. When young, he was said to be ‘like sunshine in the house’. But from the start something was wrong sexually between him and Edith, or ‘Puss’ as she was known to her family, though Teddy, significantly perhaps, also liked to call her ‘John’. Hermione Lee has no clearer answer than her predecessors as to what that something was. Does ‘Beatrice Palmato’ offer a clue that she had been abused as a child? Was Teddy bisexual? Certainly not to judge by the mistresses he took later on: ‘I find that Teddy has registered all his various temporary brides as “Mrs Wharton” in the hotels they frequented — rather a gratuitous last touch of ill-breeding,’ Edith remarked, with a characteristic combination of stoicism and snobbery.

For much of the prewar years, like the rich at Hilaire Belloc’s garden party, they led ‘independent lives of infinite variety’, though Teddy, a fanatical motorist, was more likely to arrive in a Pope Toledo than a Rolls-Royce. But gradually the shadow of his father’s mental illness overwhelmed Teddy too, periods of manic elation, wild restlessness and high spending (mostly of Edith’s money) alternating with periods sunk in depression when all he wanted to do was sit with Edith and weep the whole day long.

Hermione Lee takes the no-nonsense view that Edith ‘could see grimly what she needed to do, but could only struggle towards it, like a person walking slowly through mud in a nightmare’ — which is why it took so long to get rid of a husband who was, in James’s words to her, ‘a personage so helplessly out of gear in your existence at all’.

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