Ethan Frome,' `Age of Innocence' now on film Edith Wharton becoming film's latest literary jewel A Edition

• Published in: The Hartford courant
• Main Authors: McCLURG, JOCELYN, Courant Book Editor
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hartford, Conn Tribune Interactive, LLC 07.03.1993
• Subjects: Day-Lewis, Daniel; James, Henry (1843-1916); Wharton, Edith; Wolff, Cynthia Griffin
• ISSN: 1047-4153

Which is not to say that Wharton was the Jackie Collins of her day; far from it. In a typical slap, she has often been called a "lesser" Henry James, and James was the master of delicate parlor politics. James and Wharton were close friends, and they explored similar novelistic terrain; but as feminist critics like Cynthia Griffin Wolff and Marilyn French have pointed out, Wharton's women (and her more sensitive men) suffer when they dare defy the false values of a rigid social order. Edith Jones Wharton was born into an aristocratic New York family whose good stead in society was fortified by an inherited income. Her marriage to the mentally unstable Edward ("Teddy") Wharton was a failure; the couple divorced in 1913 and had no children. Wharton found passion for the first time in middle age when she had an affair with the philandering Morton Fullerton. Tired of Newport, Edith and Teddy Wharton built a country estate in Lenox, Mass., in 1902 called The Mount, which today is open to the public seasonally and where Shakespeare & Co. produces plays based on Wharton's writings. Wharton sold The Mount as her marriage disintegrated, and for the rest of her life France was more or less her permanent residence. After "The Age of Innocence," Wharton turned to children and families as subjects for her novels, and many critics believe her later work faltered as she attempted to re-create a New York she had long ago abandoned. A few short years before her death, Wharton published a popular autobiography, "A Backward Glance."