Edith Wharton

Ambassador Book Awards

By: Hermione Lee

Narrated by: Kate Reading

The definitive biography of one of America’s greatest writers, from the author of the acclaimed masterpiece Virginia Woolf.
Born in 1862, Edith 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. Wharton’s life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens, her heroic relief efforts during the Great War, 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.©2007 Hermione Lee; (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Well researched, narrator has good voice. Only...

Don't buy from Audible if you can avoid it. Books that are in public domain, that non profit librovox has volunteers record and then makes available for FREE to public, Jeff Bezos has on audible for SALE. profiteering off others voluntary efforts. Bezos doesn't know what the word volunteer means. IF he cared, he could employ adequate staff to monitor that this doesn't happen. No ethics. Check before you buy any public domain books from audible or Amazon, including Wharton, H James, other classics. I wish this book wasn't abridged, but unabridged doesn't seem to be available.

Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton

Brilliant! So enjoyable. I'll read the book now in its entirety. What a real pleasure.

Fascinating Life

I really enjoyed this biography, even though I have next to nothing in common with Wharton. You have to admire Wharton's love of gardens, her high standards, her organizational skills, insatiable reading of books, her devotion to France during the war. At the same time, the author does not shy away from her subject's anti-semitism and racism - which I think a lot of other biographers deliberately stay clear of. I really appreciated how the author deals with Wharton's inability to appreciate the next generation of writers. It will spur me to read more of Wharton's books, and watch the movie adaptations.

Abridgement is rough

This is a heavily abridged version of Lee's 800-page biography. Sometimes the abridgement is rough--once I got confused about where we were.

The reader does a very nice job; her French accent is very good (Wharton was fluent in French and lived in Paris for the last decades of her life, so there are many French passages in her letters.)

Lee is a brilliant biographer, famous for her work on Virginia Woolf. This biography got more mixed reviews, though I'm not sure why. I haven't read Lee's Woolf biography, but I've read her very first book which walks through all of Woolf's novels in order, and it is splendid. (That book is harder to find now; it's from back in the 70s.)

I thought I knew Edith Wharton before . . .

wonderfully indepth and well-rounded perspective of a woman we tend to think of as single faceted. Her life was much more than I had ever imagined it to be. I will go back and read her works with.a much deeper appreciation of the real woman behind the words.