Word: edith
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...surface, Edith Wharton's life was very different. The society she selected included a host of American and European literary luminaries, who frequented dinner parties at her splendidly appointed homes and accompanied her on sight-seeing jaunts across the Continent. And yet the terrible aloneness of Wharton heroines like The House of Mirth's Lily Bart was their creator's as well; for, like Dickinson, Wharton imagined herself "as gazing out through the bars of a prison at the procession of life...
This vision of the female writer struggling to escape the prison of her soul is one of the dominant motifs of R.W.B Lewis's often masterful biography of Edith Wharton. Meticulously researched and infinitely detailed, Lewis's Edith Wharton depicts its subject as a vital and complex woman, haunted throughout her life by a dismally unsuccessful marriage, but taking her place nevertheless as one of the leading literary figures...
Lewis is at his best when he attempts to outline the workings of Wharton's inner life, dismantling with obvious pleasure Percy Lubbock's depiction of her in Portrait of Edith Wharton as overly haughty and repressed. The Wharton who emerges from this biography is, by contrast, a woman whose pride is most often a cover for shyness, and whose dormant sensuality is a force that merely awaits release by the right...
...stiff than colloquial. Ironically enough, considering his awareness of the special problems Wharton faced as a woman writer, he sometimes allows his language to partake of sexual stereotyping. Describing two characters in her novel The Custom of the Country, for example, he writes: Marvell also, as it were, embodies Edith's feminine side; Moffatt her masculine side, her immense energy, her decisiveness in action, the vigor of her ironic humor. Later, he again refers to what he terms Wharton's "masculine vein of satiric humor...
Just because this particular play is destined for the dustbin does not mean that a varied season containing such up coming plays as Bingo, by England's Edward Bond, about Shakespeare's final years back in Stratford; Abigail Adams, Second First Lady, by Edith Owen; and The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, by Preston Jones, about a lunatic-fringe group from Texas, may not provide some aesthetic rewards. To take a risk is the regional theater's brand of courage...