Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)
Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
Add Edith Wharton to bookshelf
Add to Bookshelf

Look Inside

Edith Wharton

Ambassador Book Awards

Ambassador Book Awards

Ambassador Book Awards

By Hermione Lee

By Hermione Lee

By Hermione Lee

By Hermione Lee

By Hermione Lee
Read by Kate Reading

By Hermione Lee
Read by Kate Reading

Best Seller
Paperback $24.00

Apr 08, 2008 | ISBN 9780375702877

Ebook $10.99

Dec 24, 2008 | ISBN 9780307555854

Audiobook Download $17.48

Apr 10, 2007 | 518 Minutes

All Formats
+
    Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee
    Paperback $24.00
    Apr 08, 2008 | ISBN 9780375702877

    Buy from Other Retailers:

    See All Formats (2) +
    • $24.00

      Apr 08, 2008 | ISBN 9780375702877

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    • Dec 24, 2008 | ISBN 9780307555854

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    • Apr 10, 2007 | ISBN 9780739354100

      518 Minutes

      Buy from Other Retailers:

    Buy the Audiobook Download:

    About Edith Wharton

    From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton’s own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.

    About Edith Wharton

    From Hermione Lee, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, comes a superb reexamination of one of the most famous American women of letters.Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Edith Wharton-tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. Born into a wealthy family, Wharton left America as an adult and eventually chose to create a life in France. Her renowned novels and stories have become classics of American literature, but as Lee shows, Wharton’s own life, filled with success and scandal, was as intriguing as those of her heroines. Bridging two centuries and two very different sensibilities, Wharton here comes to life in the skillful hands of one of the great literary biographers of our time.

    About Edith Wharton

    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.

    Read An Excerpt

    Read An Excerpt

    Read An Excerpt

    Also by Hermione Lee

    Tom Stoppard
    Willa Cather
    Penelope Fitzgerald
    Virginia Woolf
    See all books by Hermione Lee

    Also by Hermione Lee

    Tom Stoppard
    Willa Cather
    Penelope Fitzgerald
    Virginia Woolf
    See all books by Hermione Lee

    Also by Hermione Lee

    Tom Stoppard
    Willa Cather
    Penelope Fitzgerald
    Virginia Woolf
    See all books by Hermione Lee

    About Hermione Lee

    HERMIONE LEE was president of Wolfson College (2008-2017) and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald (winner of the James Tait Black Prize and one of… More about Hermione Lee

    About Hermione Lee

    HERMIONE LEE was president of Wolfson College (2008-2017) and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald (winner of the James Tait Black Prize and one of… More about Hermione Lee

    About Hermione Lee

    HERMIONE LEE was president of Wolfson College (2008-2017) and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald (winner of the James Tait Black Prize and one of… More about Hermione Lee

    Product Details

    Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Historical Figure Biographies & Memoirs

    Paperback | $24.00
    Published by Vintage
    Apr 08, 2008 | 912 Pages | 5-3/16 x 8 | ISBN 9780375702877

    Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Historical Figure Biographies & Memoirs

    Ebook | $10.99
    Published by Vintage
    Dec 24, 2008 | 912 Pages | ISBN 9780307555854

    Category: Arts & Entertainment Biographies & Memoirs | Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Historical Figure Biographies & Memoirs | Audiobooks

    Audiobook Download | $17.48
    Published by Random House Audio
    Apr 10, 2007 | 518 Minutes | ISBN 9780739354100

    YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

    Praise

    “A remarkable feat. . . . Unquestionably authoritative, impressively exhaustive….Nobody has done Edith Wharton such careful justice as [Hermione] Lee.” —Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

    “Magnificent. . . . By far the most comprehensive study of [Wharton’s] full, populous and robust life. . . . Wharton lived a spirited and passionate life, and Lee captures that passion.” —Newsday
     
    “Thorough and intelligent. . . . This meticulous, generous biography is likely to suffice for a long time.” —Diane Johnson, The Washington Post Book World
     
    “Richly detailed, carefully nuanced. . . . Edith Wharton is not only the best book on its subject, but one of the finest literary biographies to appear in recent years.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
     
     

    Awards

    National Book Critics Circle Awards FINALIST 2007

    Looking for More Great Reads?
    21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read

    Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network

    Raise kids who love to read

    Brightly

    Raise kids who love to read

    Today's Top Books

    Today's Top Books

    Want to know what people are actually reading right now?

         An online magazine for today’s home cook

    TASTE

    An online magazine for today’s home cook