Edith Wharton Audiobook By Hermione Lee cover art

Edith Wharton

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Edith Wharton

By: Hermione Lee
Narrated by: Kate Reading
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About this listen

The definitive biography of one of America's greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf.

Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society. Her life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens and the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her.

With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.

Listen to the classics: explore our list of Edith Wharton titles.©2007 Hermione Lee (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Critic reviews

“Lively . . . Insightful . . . Thorough and intelligent . . .This meticulous, generous biography is likely to suffice for a long time . . . One can at last grasp the full range of Wharton’s writing and the full power of her energy.” (Diane Johnson, Washington Post Book World)

“A splendid biography, extremely rich in social and historical detail, a telling picture of the many years Wharton’s life spanned . . . Biography is usually the revenge of little people on big people . . .but Lee is subtle and big-hearted enough to understand her subject . . . Lee never reduces Wharton’s books to veiled autobiography, just as she is never reluctant to interpret them in the light of Wharton’s life . . . A sophisticated, finely written portrait . . . Edith Wharton would have been horrified by the ‘indiscretions’ in this biography, but it is the balanced, richly detailed, and researched portrait she deserves.” (Edmund White, The New York Review of Books)

“A rich tapestry. There is so much here . . . Edith Wharton shimmers with details about a vanished world, and Lee . . . brings it to vivid life.” (Jacqueline Blais, USA Today)

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