A Backward Glance (1934) - Edith Wharton
Her autobiography. Very well done and interesting. Good insight on her writing, travels, her friendship with Henry James and more.

I read this (a while back) side by side with Edith Wharton: a Biography by R.W.B. Lewis. [I'm sure this would be good with the more recent biography by Hermoine Lee.] It was great to compare the two, to see what Wharton said about her life, what she included and what she left out.

I'd love to find a literary biography on Wharton's works more like the book Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley, that looks at the novels and aspects of the author's life that affected those works.

"I was born happy every morning."

When I finished this book I looked at the reviews and agreed with them. I was wanting more. Wharton didn't include many juicy details, but seemed more intent on naming names of people and places she had been. There was something lacking. Maybe her own brutal honesty that she gave her characters? She seemed trapped, to me, in this book. Perhaps because as her only biographical piece, she wasn't as able to be as open as when she writes about a fictional character.

It was interesting still, especially just to hear of how she began and developed her writing career and how her characters appeared in her mind already with names attached. I also enjoyed reading of her experiences with the war and her opinions. It just seemed like something was lacking. This was more of a travellogue and thank you (she wanted to make sure to mention certain names, to thank people). Maybe she was just getting older and that is precisely what it was.

I was also rather disappointed to feel a sort of ...superiority in her towards what was acceptable socially. It seemed important to her to run in certain circles and be fashionable. With her recognition in her novels of how unimportant those things were, I guess I would have hoped she lived with the same conviction.

I did enjoy her explanation as to how writers were perceived as being a threat and bohemian at the time in New York. It was an insight to that society. Men who didn't have jobs, people who lived off of trusts. "The leisure class" as she called it. -How she enjoyed the daily visiting and social proprieties. It did seem however like they just wasted an awful lot of time. Motoring and dining. When her works came out and her name better known, she dealt with people's opinions and seemed to have a headstrongness about her.

I was just at the Rue de Varennes in France I few months back and thought of her as I walked down the street, not far from the river Seine. She was an independent woman, driving to the war fronts and reporting. Living alone in beautiful Paris.

She spoke nothing of her personal life, which I think was a pity. Would have been much more interesting.

Respect her love of travel. Reading. Her need to write. Love of conversation.

❤️

Edith Wharton has written many novels, some of which (House of Mirth; Ethan Fromme; The Age of Innocence) have been made into movies. Her autobiography is as much of a depiction of the now-lost era of pre-WW1 New York and European society as it is about her own life. Although I felt put off once or twice at a touch of snobbishness due to her upbringing, I fell in love with her written words. I most especially enjoyed her stories about her friend Henry James. But it is her final two chapters ("The War"; "And After") that touched me greatly. It is here that Edith Wharton is at her most poignant.

I recommend this book to anyone who has read her novels or the novels of Henry James, or who is interested in pre-WW1 life.

I found this book in the mailroom in my building, and even though I read Ethan Frome in high school and loathed it, I was a little bit curious about Edith Wharton, whose American home "The Mount" in Lenox, MA I had toured.

At first I was put off by her privileged childhood, and not sure the book was worth the time. I persevered, and was rewarded. Her writing is so clear, obvious from her rendering of her writing process, description of many friends, and life in New York, Lenox, England and France.

I went through the book with a heavy highlighter. I learned that in her New York social circle, leisure was the expected occupation, and her family and friends never mentioned any of her writings, as if it was an embarrassment. Nor did they discuss anyone else's books. They were not readers at all, and she was quite an anomaly.

Her family was so disturbed at her bookishness that they scheduled her debut at 17. After she married, at 23, she and her husband began to travel, and Edith found her own society.

She discusses her writing process in the chapter "Secret Garden." Although I don't write fiction, I have always been curious about how different writers do it, and her description was fascinating.

There is a chapter about Henry James, a lifelong friend of hers. She has a great admiration for him and his writing, but in describing some of his interactions with others, she revealed him as a rather nasty critic who could dish it out but couldn't take it himself, though she doesn't seem to see it that way. To me, who has enjoyed several of his books, he seems a rather petty and particular old bachelor.

During WWI, she was living in France, and very involved in supporting the war effort. I would have liked to read more about that.

It surprised me that her most famous and popular novel, The Age of Innocence, was written after the end of the war, in a period when she was recuperating from the effects of living through the war. The Age of Innocence was set in an old New York of her youth, a world that no longer existed. Perhaps time and distance had distilled that world for her, perhaps looking back shielded her from thinking about the horrors of the war in France.

And now I am eager to read some of her novels.

There's a fabulous quote in the first few paragraphs of her autobio-- to the effect that one can endure all life's sorrows if one remains curious; happy in small things and interested in big ones-- which (I should be able to quote exactly from memory but can't at the moment-- However-- it is how I have always approached life and it's served me well all these years. If anyone recalls the exact quote-- would be happy to hear from her or him... .

This beautifully told autobiography recounts Edith Wharton's childhood in New York City, with months in Europe and Newport, Rhode Island.

Edith Wharton explores her beginnings as a writer. She describes The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts, and her homes in France. She recounts her troubled marriage with tact and focuses on the friendships she shared with Henry James and other writers of her generation.

Edith Wharton wrote many books, and their quality varies. This is her best book.

This was an amazing and interesting read about a very talented author. I read it along with her other book, Edith Wharton at Home Life at the Mount. That is a beautiful book with beautiful pictures of her designs. I have always loved gardening so found that a real plus.

Wharton spends a lot of this book telling her readers who she visited, where she went, who visited her...listings that were not of too much interest to me. Less about her writing process than I would have liked. I was interested in seeing that she was friends with Bernard Berenson and in reading a few brief anecdotes about Theodore Roosevelt.

For the most part I absolutely loved Wharton's autobiography. If there's one thing I appreciate in an author it's the ability to write a beautiful sentence, and Wharton is a master:

Norton was supremely gifted as an awakener, and no thoughtful mind can recall without a thrill the notes of the first voice which has called it out of its morning dream.

I can't think of any better way to express the feeling you get when you are learning from a great teacher. And her outlook on life was inspiring:

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.

I also cannot express how much I enjoyed the stories Wharton told about her beloved friend, the Master, Henry James. I've read biographies of James, his novels, biographies of his brother William and sister Alice, and Wharton's account is the best at providing a look at a different side of James. Not a brother, not the famous novelist, but a dear friend.

Many have criticized Wharton for not going into the details of her divorce or her affair with Morton Fullerton. I do not. Can you really expect someone raised in the society described in The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence to go into such personal details in an autobigoraphy?

A few things prevented this book from achieving five star status. At times the lists of friends grew tiresome, especially the Paris chapter. I also wish more time had been given to her thoughts about her work (The Age of Innocence gets a mere two paragraphs). But overall, a very enjoyable look into the life of one of my favorite writers.

Valutazione 3,5
Una biografia di taglio mondano, poco privata e molto pubblica in cui, in un tourbillon di aneddoti divertenti, di viaggi, incontri con eminenti personalità del mondo artistico, accademico, politico, letterario la Wharton ci porta in giro per mezza Europa, a contatto con quel mondo intellettuale a lei congeniale che la formò e la educò come scrittrice, fino al duro impatto con la Prima Guerra Mondiale che, per certi versi, segna la fine di tale società. Tra le tante figure di spicco che conobbe e frequentò, due le furono particolarmente care: Henry James e Howard Sturgis, suoi grandissimi amici, con i quali visse in stretto contatto e condivise gli anni più significativi della sua vita intellettuale e non.
Una bambina e adolescente sicuramente privilegiata ma isolata, che nn sentiva un grande feeling con la sofisticata ma poco acculturata società americana perchè affascinata dalla cultura, dai libri, dalla poesia, dalla scrittura tutte cose quasi estranee a loro. Una donna essenzialmente cosmopolita quindi, inizialmente molto intimidita dagli incontri con le più grandi personalità di quel mondo letterario che venerava, e poi via via più a a suo agio man mano che la sua fama di scrittrice si consolidava.
Un ritratto essenzialmente pubblico direi che, forse, mostra poco della vera Edith, della sua interiorità, delle sue emozioni che probabilmente traspare meglio dai suoi scritti...

When she gets into telling a story about the past, it's pretty fun, but a lot of the book reads like an Oscar acceptance speech - just long lists of names and why she's grateful to them.

The autobiography helped to put the other books into context. It is helpful to understand where Wharton was both geographically and biographically when reading her books. Understanding that her husband had affairs and bouts of mental illness and the two were divorced in 1913; nevertheless; he is barely mentioned. In fact, the divorce is never mentioned. The book is a literary namedrop for many of the great authors and poets of the period but she discloses almost nothing of her private life -- which I guess was a privilege of the times.