The novels of American author Edith Wharton (1862-1937) have long been required reading for students. Now, the life and work of this brilliant and intriguing woman are receiving new attention from an ever widening audience. As another century is about to turn, readers are discovering modern insights into the fiction of this writer who was first published a century before.

The Mount, her former house and gardens in Lenox, Massachussets, is being renovated and her works dramatized by the theater group in residence there. Her novels The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome have been made into Hollywood films, and her unfinished novel The Buccaneers has been "finished" and optioned for a film.

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This, the first copiously illustrated biography of Edith Wharton, provides a fascinating survey of her life and times. The book goes well beyond Wharton as literary luminary to reveal her lifelong passions for travel; gardening; art, architecture, and interior decoration; her role as front-line correspondent and charity volunteer during World War I; and her expatriate years in France.

Author Eleanor Dwight combines personal biography with comparisons of how elements of Wharton's life are reflected in her writing. Dwight tells the story of a social "insider" who struggled against the constraints of her class yet at the same time used her inside experience to create her best novels.

Along the way Dwight weaves in Wharton's friendships with many notable personalities of the age, including Henry James, Henry Adams, and Bernard Berenson; her marriage and divorce; her poignant affair with Morton Fullerton; and the social and political atmosphere of the period, as the Belle Epoque gave way to a new century marked by drastic upheaval; a devastating world war followed by worldwide economic collapse.

Dwight organizes her material around the various places Wharton lived and visited - New York, Rome, Newport, Lenox, Paris, and the south of France. She highlights Wharton's wonderful visual gift and her love for places - whether it be a New England landscape, a French village, an Italian garden, or a beautifully appointed room - and celebrates her genius for enjoying and describing them.

The reader comes away with a new understanding of Wharton's continual quest to find, literally, her place in the world and in the rapidly changing, often bewildering climate of the early twentieth century.

The more than 300 illustrations include photographs - some by Wharton herself as well as selected drawings, paintings, garden plans, letters, and postcards, many of which have never before been published. A chronology, selected bibliography, and index round out this volume, which re-creates in vivid detail the life and milieu of an extraordinary woman.