It is impossible to libel the dead; legal insurance of reputation stops during the grave. But is it probable to confuse the dead?
Stern Collection/Bettmann-Corbis
Edith Wharton, circa 1877.
THE AGE OF DESIRE
By Jennie Fields
352 pp. Pamela Dorman Books/Viking. $ 27.95.
Modern writers keep trying. If any the single would have been flustered by having his sexuality, or lack of it, explored in critical literature, it would have been Henry James. Fears of post-mortem invasions of his remoteness led him to the frenzy of letter burning, though the reams which he longed for were sufficient to inspire such conjecture by the censor Leon Edel as well as the novelist Colm Toibin, in between many others.
There is no need to assume about the personal life of Henry James's friend Edith Wharton, the subject of Jennie Fields's novel "The Age of Desire." Wharton's furious affair, in middle age, with the American sermonise publisher Morton Fullerton furious on her part, which is, though routine on his is well documented in the ardent as well as pitiable letters she wrote to him. Despite her pleas to lapse them, as the lady was obliged to do when the adore event ended, Fullerton, well well known as the serial cad to various besotted ladies as well as gentlemen, kept as well as eventually sole letters from both Edith Wharton as well as Henry James.
There could frequency be the some-more apt theme for the novel of manners than the struggle of the prominent as well as important lady to disguise her delirious feelings in order to meet the conventions of society. It is not usually her frantic yearning for her lover which is portrayed here, though the fallout voiced in her exasperation with her hu! sband as well as her paper partner for unknowingly getting in the way.
A secondary novel-of-manners theme, developed from the author's research, concerns the relationship in between Wharton as well as Anna Bahlmann, her childhood governess, who became her paper assistant. With no transparent amicable clarification covering such the development, the women vacillate in between working as friends as well as colleagues or as chick on the side as well as servant.
Authentic letters are quoted to accelerate the pitiful approach in which Wharton was reduced to essay like the lovesick teenager, snapping "Don't write me again!" in her annoy which Fullerton had, in fact, not written, as well as the week later pleading which he should have well known she didn't mean it. Bahlmann's letters pointedly omit the slights she suffered, as if acknowledging she was in no in front of to complain. There are credible scenes dramatizing the ensuing flighty behavior.
The smirch in this otherwise engaging novel is which its title, mimicking Edith Wharton's own title, "The Age of Innocence," presupposes an understanding not just of these personal lives though of the times in which they were lived. Wharton's novels, together with those set in later durations like "The Children" as well as "The Mother's Recompense," are rich with examples of conventions in flux as they designate elaborating amicable attitudes. Fields's novel is rife with examples which are anachronistic as well as therefore misleading. By the time Edith Wharton's post-mortem adore letters were published in the 1980s, it would not be terminally embarrassing for the lady in the dissolving matrimony to have the lover. But it's safe to contend which this particular lady would have been broke to see herself as well as the Parisian multitude she enjoyed inadvertently portrayed as undeveloped as well as provincial.
The novel's opening stage takes place in 1907 during an intellectual French salon where, in what passes for arch conversation, the poet A! nna de N oailles demands, "Why do they never give the Nobel Prize to the woman?" Someone counters which the single had been awarded the assent esteem (that would be Bertha von Suttner in 1905). It's left to the frustrated reader to shout "Marie Curie!" during this supposed hotbed of Parisian sophistication, where no the single seems to know which the womanlike 1903 production winner is toiling in the nearby suburb, on her approach to winning her second Nobel Prize, this time for chemistry.
Judith Martin writes the Miss Manners books as well as newspaper as well as Internet columns. She is the writer of two novels.
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