Biography:Almost 40 years after Edith Wharton's death, a researcher working on her papers in the library at Yale University found an astonishing unpublished fragment by her entitled Beatrice Palmato which dealt quite graphically with an act of incest between a father and a daughter.
The publication of this as an appendix to RWB Lewis's biography in 1975, coupled with Lewis's account of Wharton's love affair with Morton Fullerton in Paris in the early years of the 20th century, and Lewis's quotations from her passionate and forlorn love letters, changed the way that Wharton, described variously by those who knew her as "devoid of frailty" and "as hard and dry as porcelain", was seen by her readers.
The problem remained for biographers, however, how to interpret Beatrice Palmato, and how to connect her personal life to her work - how to relate, for example, her deeply unhappy marriage to Teddy Wharton, which ended in bitter divorce, and the mixture in her of a determination to thrive and a sort of sorrowful disappointment, to her work.
It is a sign of Hermione Lee's sophistication and skill as a biographer that she is ready merely to date Beatrice Palmato as best she can and not to build her book around an easy interpretation of the fragment as semi-autobiographical, something that might explain Wharton's fascinating and brittle personality and complex body of work. Lee brings the same judicious and scrupulous intelligence to bear on Wharton as she did on Virginia Woolf, her previous subject, applying the same unusual method, which is to take single themes in the writer's life and make them into discrete essays, rather than to move forward day by day, noting each thing as it happened.
EDITH WHARTON WAS born Edith Jones in New York in 1862 into a background of considerable privilege, so much so that the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" may have referred to an earlier generation of her family. During her childhood, like many others of her class, she was closer to her nanny - in this case the Irishwoman Hannah Doyle - than to her parents or siblings. Her New York is that of her novel The Age of Innocence - provincial, conservative, living on inherited income, locked in a set of morals and manners that it would be her pleasure to describe with a cool wit, her eye always on the outsider, the moment of danger or weakness, and the drama that leads to long disappointment, spiced with stoicism, or, in the case of her novel The House of Mirth, swift decline.
Her own disappointment began early, as soon as she was married in 1885. "Everything, indeed, suggests a disaster," Hermione Lee writes, "her frequent illness and depression in the years following her marriage, their separate rooms, their childlessness, their growing estrangement, and, in her writing, her interest in the subject of sexual privation and wretched marriages". Wharton's own talent as a writer displayed itself early too. But this would be a much less interesting story, and a much shorter book, if her writing had merely depended on her unhappiness. She was far too interesting for that. It was her resilience and spirit, the quality of her will, her bravery and her energy that, along with her talent and her range as a writer, set her apart.
Her imagination was nourished by travel, as she developed a real knowledge first of Italy and then of France, where she eventually settled and to which she became intensely loyal, especially during the first World War. She was a brave and feisty traveller, taking to the donkey as well as enjoying the yacht and the motorcar. She was also tremendously interested in designing houses and gardens, including the Mount, her only house in the United States, which Henry James described as "a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond". Lee offers elaborate descriptions of how, time after time, Wharton's rooms were furnished and her terraces planted. This is matched, to be fair, with a very detailed and exact reading of Wharton's fiction, much, I should say, to my relief.
Wharton was also a most formidable worker - producing in her final decades, for example, a book a year, many of which made her a great deal of money; she was also a voracious reader, a loyal and demanding friend and a great correspondent. Her life, indeed, had much in common with that of Lady Gregory, who was born a decade earlier. They both married unsuitably and had a secret and passionate love affair; they both had gnarled national allegiances; they both had a close friendship with an older famous male writer - WB Yeats in the case of Lady Gregory and Henry James in the case of Wharton - whom they admired and in whose shadow they have been seen; and they both had flair for hospitality and organisation, as well as exuding grandeur and hauteur, especially in the presence of lesser mortals.
Both women, in the accounts we have of them, also were fearless and fearful bossyboots, although Wharton, who loved luxury, had a lot more servants to boss than Lady Gregory - enough, indeed, for her to remark after the first World War: "If I ever completely lose my faith in human nature, it will be owing to my dealing with French servants."
WHARTON MET MORTON Fullerton in 1907. The following year she wrote: "The moment my eye fell upon him I was content." Fullerton, who seemed to have many hidden charms, had been working as a correspondent in the Paris office of the London Times since 1891. She was subtly warned about him by Henry James, who had once found Fullerton as attractive as she did, writing to him for example: "I want in fact more of you . . . You are dazzling . . . you are beautiful; you are more than tactful, you are tenderly magically tactile. But you are not kind. There it is. You are not kind."
Wharton did not know, however, about Fullerton's other liaisons, or that he had had an affair with Lord Ronald Gower, upon whom Wilde based the character of Lord Henry in his The Picture of Dorian Gray. She simply fell passionately in love with him, and, in return, he was not, as James put it, kind. He did not even return her letters when she asked for them. This was, of course, a gift to future biographers, but it was hardly any fun at the time for this most dignified and controlling of women to know that others would see lines like: "What you wish, apparently, is to take of my life the inmost and uttermost that a woman - a woman like me - can give, for an hour now and then when it suits you; & when the hour is over, to leave me out of your mind & out of your life as a man leaves the companion who has afforded him a transient distraction."
She survived him, and her best work was, as Lee makes clear, produced in spite of this affair and cannot be simply explained by it. The nuanced elegance of her style and her ability to create complex characters and darkly suggestive lives belonged to her from the start.
Hermione Lee's own method fails her slightly a few times in the book. We need to know much more about Wharton's marriage, for example, before we hear the whole story of Fullerton. And the unpleasant side of her politics and her objections to Modernism come too much in a heap. But this is a small price to pay for the overall coherence and good sense of the system Lee has adopted. Her subtle and painstaking ability to illuminate the work with the life, and to make the life itself so interesting makes this a superb biography.
• Colm Tóibín's latest book is Mothers and Sons, published by Picador
Edith Wharton By Hermione Lee Chatto & Windus, 853pp. £25