Edith Wharton......one of the greatest novelists in her time wrote in such a way that her words are still relevant today. To read her life story in her own words was a real treasure. Her life was one of privilege and she did shy away from that, but her honesty is what struck me. Her words of her own life mirror the structures of her characters she wrote about. She wrote at the end “I am born happy every morning”. Whether that was reality for her or just a state of mind, to be able to put it in words; what joy!

On my last vacation, I visited Edith Wharton's beloved home, the Mount, in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, even though I had never read anything by her. I have now corrected that oversight by reading her memoir, A Backward Glance. At first, I was put off by her recounts of endless dinners and gatherings, thinking that she was a bit of a name-dropper. Then, I realized that she was born in the late 1800s, before telephones, television, and cell-phones were invented. Of course, that's how people entertained themselves! Then her writing made perfect sense.

2.5

Bit of a dull read - lots of lists of books read and people seen, and being broadly unfamiliar with both reading through them was a bit of a slog. May recommend reading a biography of Wharton rather than this autobiography.

It was a joy to read the personal accounts of Edith Wharton's writing, growing up in New York City, and close relationship with Henry James. This autobiography was very much like her novels, in that I was constantly surprised at how funny Edith was, although by now I should no longer be surprised that one of the greatest writers of the 19th century had a biting wit.

my powers of enjoyment have always been many-sided, and the mere fact of being alive and young and active was so exhilarating that I could seldom spare the time to listen to my inner voices. Yet when they made themselves heard again they had become irresistible.

the novelist's best safeguard is to put out of his mind the quality of the praise or blame bestowed on him by reviewers and readers, and to write only for that dispassionate and ironic critic who dwells within the breast.

I was a little confused by some of the criticism of this here on Goodreads. It's a memoir, not an autobiography, which may seem like splitting hairs, but the whole point of a memoir is that you share bits and pieces of your life that you feel are worth relating, not the whole thing. So yeah, she leaves out her divorce and many other important events, but the point is that she's trying to focus on more pleasant memories. However, this brings its own drawbacks. Too often these memories just amount to a list of people she knew or various anecdotes that were probably funny at the time but left me a little cold. But as always, her prose is fantastic and as a result it's still pretty pleasant to read.

It's hard to not compare A Backward Glance to Speak, Memory. Nabokov and Wharton were both insufferably aristocratic and they were both fantastic prose stylists. The main difference is that Nabokov made his world seem real and beautiful, while Wharton's seems strangely distant. Her aristocratic snobbishness is pretty amusing at times, though (at one point she relates that Melville wasn't welcome in high society because of his "deplorable bohemianism"). It's also interesting, because in her novels she seemed extremely sympathetic to the plight of women in society and the poor in rural New England, but here she reveals that she was incredibly dismissive and condescending to the latter and held views that are pretty incompatible with feminism. She was a complex lady.

P.S. On her great grandfather’s estate: “It stood, as its name suggests, on a terraced height in what is now the dreary waste of Astoria[.]” :((((

Why 5 stars, why the heart? Why, indeed. Why, if only for the first few pages, I would give this book 10 stars! Wharton's star shines brightest when she explains what to expect from this memoir, and why: every other sentence and paragraph stands out as a quotable quote. Clearly she was blessed with the knack for storytelling, and had an affinity with books long before she could even read--her gift of imagery and pretend, of having her characters literally introduce themselves to her with complete names, addresses and professions (or lack thereof) calls to mind Mozart's magic--"music from God," to hear Dr Yeou-Cheng Ma describe it. The result: effortless, "real" stories. While she does tend to ramble on about Henry James, this is excusable, as she also highlights her great friendships with other notable intellectuals and raconteurs of her day. It's interesting to note how most of her closest friendships were with older or much younger men. Little known were her contributions to the war effort. Anglophile/Francophile? Yes. Also, most certainly a literary snob. That's my Edith!

A Backward Glance: An Autobiography takes readers up to 1934, but Wharton's account of the years post-1918 barely amount to an epilogue. She is not desolate, she still draws from her usual sources of joy. Writing, reading, the conversation of a circle of brilliant though fast-dwindling friends, travel, especially yachting the Aegean and motoring in far reaches (given her identification with the French elite, I found it perfect that her exploration of Morocco was smoothed by none other than General Lyautey). But, she says, life is not the same, many have died, much is ended. Her account of Henry James' decline and death during the war, in a nightmare of empathetic anguish, is hard reading:

I have never seen any one else who, without a private personal stake in that awful struggle, suffered from it as he did. He had not my solace of hard work, though he did all he had strength for, and gave all the pecuniary help he could. But it was not enough. His devouring imagination was never at rest, and the agony was more than he could bear. As far as I know the only letters of mine which he kept were those in which I described my various journeys to the front, and when these were sent back to me after his death they were worn with much handing about. His sensitiveness about his own physical disabilities gave him an exaggerated idea of what his friends were able to do, and he never tired of talking of what he regarded as their superhuman activities. But still the black cloud hung over the world, and to him it was soon to be a pall. Perhaps it was better so. I should have liked to have him standing beside me the day the victorious armies rode by; but when I think of the years intervening between his death and that brief burst of radiance I have not the heart to wish that he had seen it. The waiting would have been too bitter.

So glad to have been able to share in her life's journey. She writes about her travels, acquaintances, her various homes, her love of gardening. A bit difficult to read because of the old writing style but well worth it.

I found Edith Wharton’s autobiography very limited (and in many ways) condescending. Wharton loved to share all the details of her exciting, elitist’s lifestyle but when it came to her losses, Wharton completely ignores them. According to her publisher in 1934, regarding her autobiography, “it was so unrevealing that its publishers, to Wharton's fury, tried to adjust their contract to permit severe cutting of what they called long "dull" parts.” www.http:www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf...

Most likely in order to keep her reputation, Wharton decided not to include both her 1913 divorce with her husband Teddy, who took a mistress, embezzled money, and suffered from mental illness. And her brief, passionate love affair (at age 46) with journalist Morton Fullerton. Wharton had destroyed her photos and letters and asked Fullerton to do the same. But he did not, and many years after her death, they were published. Overall I found it a challenging read.

This is a well-written autobiography, but I it can be hard to follow as Edith Wharton drops names and places and adds foreign phrases that need to be deciphered. Her life appears to have been a whirlwind of parties and socials and things out of place in today's world. I feel I can better understand her novels, having spent some time with her life.

The first half of this I was going to give it a 5 but got a bit tired of it towards the end. Do not get me wrong it could have not been written any better but I got tired of her forever talking about this this person and that with out going into much detail about many of them. I am going to order some of her books to read though. I guess I should have given it a 4.