No Gifts From Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton - Softcover

Benstock, Shari

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140172831 ISBN 13: 9780140172836

Publisher: Penguin Putnam~trade, 1995

Synopsis

Offers a new approach to the life and work of Edith Wharton (1862-1937), drawing on the recent discovery of 8000 of her letters and examining the intricate network of relations between her life and art, her public reputation and private life. Previous biographies have cast Wharton as a contradictory character, but here the author strives to engage her - one of America's most prolific writers in her time - both as a woman and a writer, examining the place of a woman and the meaning of femininity and female sexuality in late-19th and early 20th-century America and France. Particular attention is payed to Wharton's childhood and young adulthood in New York and Newport, her breaking away from America and the years of her residency in France, most importantly in Paris, where she successfully entered the closed society of French nobility.

About this title

About the Author

SHARI BENSTOCK is Professor of English at the University of Miami (Florida).

From Kirkus Reviews

This conscientious and inclusive biography of Wharton (born Edith Newbold ``Pussy'' Jones, 1862-1937) draws its obscure title from a poem by Matthew Arnold describing someone who ``conquered fate.'' Benstock (English/Univ. of Miami), however, tells the story of a young woman whose fate wasn't so bad that it needed to be conquered. Born with great talent, connections, and financial resources, Wharton married into her own leisured class and enjoyed a position that allowed her to travel, entertain, and create beautiful homes. While her marriage to a manic-depressive may have been unfulfilled and her health was always precarious, she was financially and socially able to indulge in the uncertain vocation of writing. Between 1878 and 1937, she published 44 volumes: poems, short stories, travel books, memoirs, cultural criticism (French Ways and Their Meaning, 1919), aesthetics (The Writing of Fiction, 1925), and novels (including Ethan Frome, 1911, and The Age of Innocence, 1920). While critics disagreed over her Victorian elegance as much as over her astute social criticism, she was granted doctorates of letters at Yale, Columbia, and Rutgers; honored by the American Academy; and awarded a Pulitzer Prize. She found ``gifts'' in admiring friends such as Henry James (with whose former lover, Morton Fullerton, she experienced sexual fulfillment in a rather lurid affair) and Theodore Roosevelt. She also found a generous, powerful, grateful publisher, Charles Scribner, who called her ``the George Eliot of her time'' and introduced her to F. Scott Fitzgerald--who, according to conflicting legends, either fell at her feet or threatened to jump out the window. Despite her writing the first Wharton biography to draw on unpublished as well as published sources, Benstock offers no justification for her thesis that Wharton was either a victim or a hero. Rather, she appears to have been a fortunate woman who made excellent use of her opportunities, resources, and talents. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Putnam~trade
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140172831
• ISBN 13: 9780140172836
• Binding: Paperback