Gillian Tindall
THE END OF LOVE
Edith Wharton
By Hermione Lee (Chatto & Windus 852pp £25)

It is a strange fate for a celebrated writer to be remembered as the friend of a still more famous one. Such, for a generation after her death in 1937, was Edith Wharton's lot. Her novels were out of fashion, indeed had been consigned to that limbo of all things 'Victorian' - 'prim', 'mannered', 'violets and old lace', etc - by a consciously modern public who simply supposed her books to be like that, from their setting in old New York, without actually reading them. Her personal image was of a large, rich, imperious old lady who - ah, ha - had seized on poor Henry James who was too polite to resist her and bore him off on wild journeys across France by chauffeured car. Did not James himself write piteously to friends of her 'unappeasable summons', and refer to her as an 'eagle' swooping down on him and as 'the Angel Devastation'? And had not others complained about her bossiness, her arbitrary changes of plan, her chilliness to people who did not measure up to her own high social or intellectual standards, and her nineteenth-century assumption (correct, as it turned out) that her life would always be well padded with servants and that this was her right?

It was, actually, all true, but what a partial truth. Like all proper writers, the creator of Undine Spragg and Lily Bart (not to mention the lower-class Bunner sisters) was a far more complicated, vulnerable and perceptive person than the grande dame of posthumous myth. With R W B Lewis's sympathetic 1970s biography, the wheel of time had begun to turn, and since then her best writings (The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence and a number of her shorter novellas and stories) have delighted a fresh generation of readers who are free to see her more limpidly in the context of her own now safely distant times. New editions of these books and others have been brought out; in recent years two good films have been made.

PThere has, inevitably, been a downside. The label 'old-fashioned' has been replaced, in some quarters, by simplistic modern interpretations of her life and work. She has been claimed as a feminist, which she certainly wasn't, in spite of her feeling for the mis-educated, over-ambitious Lily Barts of life: she disapproved of the suffragettes, and her sympathies with the modern world (which she characterised as all-round 'jazz') seem to have shut down fairly comprehensively after the First World War. She has also, on the strength of an odd, pornographic story of incest found among her papers after death, been claimed as a child victim of paternal abuse, and this is touted as an 'explanation' for her failed marriage and the fact that many of her male friends were more or less homosexual. There is, it should be said, not a shred of real evidence that her father, from a conventional New York family, ever laid an improper finger on her, and the supposition that a writer must have experienced personally everything that appears in his or her writing is self-evidently absurd. Novelists make things up: that's what we do.

Hermione Lee deals briskly with the abuse theory, as also with the persistent story that Edith was not, actually, the daughter of her mother's husband but the result of an adulterous affair with one or other of two possible candidates, both more intellectual than the Rhinelander-Joneses and their usual set. Personally, this story has always given me some pause for thought. Edith must have got her cuckoo-in-the-nest intelligence from somewhere, her voracious appetite for books, and also her reddish hair.

But then the whole question as to how much Edith repudiated the world in which she was brought up, and how much she remained, at some level, inexorably part of it, is a complex one. It would be mistaken to assume that because she criticised that world, both implicitly in her novels and explicitly to close friends, for its social assumptions, its snobberies and hypocrisies and destructive repressions, that she never fitted into it. Her whole life, Edith enjoyed what was then called 'worldly' living: social occasions conducted in great comfort, good food and drink, foreign sightseeing, a huge number of rather posh friends and acquaintances (an inborn snobbery of her own entered in here, as with almost everyone of her generation) - and gossip. Hermione Lee's sudden remark that 'she liked her solitude and did not enjoy "society"' seems inexplicable alongside everything else we are told. If Edith had not relished 'society', and been part of it, she would never have acquired the insider's understanding to depict it in the way she did: she would not have been able to chart Lily Bart's subtle but lethal over-stepping of 'the narrow line between social success and moral failure', she would not have been able to present so sympathetically Newland Archer's decision to turn his back on the prospect of a different life abroad in favour of familiar values.

As for Edith's own 'new life', her escape to France and adoption of that country, her abandonment of her American marriage, her near-perfect command of the French language, her great and generous charitable efforts during the First World War - much has been made of all this as a whole new and more suitable identity. But she had already lived abroad as a child, with her parents; in reality the world she occupied in Paris, elsewhere in France, and also across the Channel, was another version of her inherited American world, with its own social taboos. She was always very taken with European aristocracy, and the Americans she associated with in Europe, including Henry James and Walter Berry (the Paris head of the American Chamber of Commerce), were not distinctly different from those she had gravitated to on the other side of the Atlantic. If anything, her social antennae were probably less acute in Europe than on her home territory. This biography's rather over-extensive bottin mondain of her Paris circle has some dubious names, including that of Paul Bourget of Action Française, and among English county society her great friend was the extravagant and amoral Mary Hunter of Hill Hall. With her passion for house-buying, Edith Wharton very nearly acquired her own country house in England near the Hunters untersHH in 1913. I am inclined to think that here she had her own lucky escape from moral failure.

Hermione Lee gives proper prominence to the role houses and their décor played in Edith's active life and in the iconography of her fiction. She quotes the wonderful passage in the short story 'The Fulness of Life' about a woman's life as a 'great house full of rooms' with one secret innermost room where 'the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes'. But she does not relate this to Flaubert's celebrated, analogous remark, which Edith Wharton surely knew, about each of us having a secret 'royal chamber of the heart' which, in some cases, is never visited. And here is a central problem with this enormously comprehensive, detailed, fair and in many ways admirable biography. Although its estimates of the novels, when we get to them, are perceptive and appropriate, as a writer's life this book seems so heavily weighted on the side of material details, with the dates and places of Edith's constant travels, with plans being made and unmade, with correspondence, with acquaintances met and re-met - that it risks sinking under its own research.

The text runs to 756 pages, not counting Notes. Very few lives are best presented in such an exhaustive format, which, by its very nature, tends to recapitulate the same facts in various places and blurs chronological outlines. The immensely detailed set-pieces - on this or that friendship, on Teddy Wharton's manic depression and their protracted divorce, on Edith's one affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton - appear as pre-determined overviews, telling their own stories but not necessarily The Story we are trying to follow. With Fullerton, in particular, Lee seems to have conceived such a dislike for this 'bounder', that she creates the impression that he humiliated Edith by neglect from the start. This, paradoxically, makes Edith's eventual pursuit of her perfidious lover look much more foolish than it was: indeed, if Fullerton was really as unrewarding as Lee suggests, why did Edith fall so heavily for him long before they actually got into bed? Their assignations in the Charing Cross Hotel, to the sad sounds of night trains, were not the climax of love to her but its ending, and, as a writer, she had the judgement to see this and to make it all eventual grist to her mill.