Word: edith
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...LETTERS OF EDITH WHARTON (Scribner's; $29.95). The writer's marvelously acute and poignant love letters, penned during an ill-fated mid-life affair, offer a new look at the private pains of a publicly triumphant life...
...bring, or send, me such fragments of correspondence as still exist?" The writer continues, "In one sense, as I told you, I am indifferent to the fate of this literature. In another sense, my love of order makes me resent the way in which inanimate things survive their uses!" Edith Wharton, then 47, was referring to her love letters in the possession of Morton Fullerton, a charming rotter who alternately pursued and ignored her. She was also, and none too subtly, trying to make her unpredictable suitor do something -- anything. But Fullerton did not send back his married lover...
...Wharton-Fullerton correspondence makes this book more than simply a companion to R.W.B. Lewis' Pulitzer-prizewinning Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975). Her affair with the journalist was no secret to intimate friends or later biographers, but her private responses to it were. And the dignified vulnerability she displayed during this period softens the austere image she cultivated during her 75 years. The regal bearing and the profile with its generous, slightly prognathous jaw remain intact. It is now possible to see with what effort, and after what struggles, she held her head so high...
...retrospect, it is easy to see why Henry James at first viewed the younger Edith Wharton with some alarm. He might have invented her, except that she was a Jamesian heroine even richer and brighter than his imagination had dared. And her novels made more money than his. The record of their growing friendship is only one of many happy adventures in this brimming, brilliant collection...
...autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, he breezily describes his and Nancy's attention to syndicated horoscopes. And Nancy Reagan is far from the first First Lady to seek guidance from extrascientific sources. Mary Todd Lincoln attended seances trying to contact her dead son Willie, and Edith Wilson and Florence Harding consulted the same clairvoyant...