In Our Time - Edith Wharton

Episode Date: October 4, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works of Wharton (1862-1937) such as The Age of Innocence for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and was the first woman to do so, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. Her novels explore the world of privileged New Yorkers in the Gilded Age of the late C19th, of which she was part, drawing on her own experiences and written from the perspective of the new century, either side of WW1 . Among her themes, she examined the choices available to women and the extent to which they could ever really be free, even if rich. With Dame Hermione Lee Biographer, former President of Wolfson College, OxfordBridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of LeedsAndLaura Rattray Reader in North American Literature at the University of GlasgowProducer: Simon Tillotson

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, Edith Wharton, 1862 to 1937, wrote of high society in America's gilded age, which for women in her novels was more of a gilded cage. Reputation was a woman's fortune.

Her way to a financially strong marriage and any blemish would lead to her ruin. It was different for the men who could brazen anything out, provided they remained solvent. Wharton earned a pullet surprise and millions of dollars from novels such as the House of Merth and the Age of Innocence, written in France where she settled for the freedom it brought her, as well as a clear perspective on America from across the Atlantic. With me to discuss the works and life of Edith Warden are, there Mahmaine Lee, biographer and former president of Wolfson College Oxford, Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds, and Laura Rattray, reader in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow.

Hermania Lee, what was the world in which she was born? Yes, she's born into the New York leisureed classes. They were wealthy. I mean, her family, who were Joneses, were supposed to originate the phrase keeping up with the Joneses. I'm not sure whether that's drawn on. They weren't wealthy in the sort of Vanderbilt-Aster level, but they were well-off, and they didn't do very much.

They had sort of great social routines, which were dinners and balls and coming out parties and duck shooting and polo matches. Where did the money come from? Well, the money for them mainly came from real estate. And actually that wobbled a bit because she was born in the middle of the civil war and after the civil war there was a depression

and the family, in order to save some of their Luca went off and lived in Europe. And this was crucial for her. So she spent part of her time in Europe as a child and became what she later called a wretched exotic, a plant that can't quite, you know, root itself either in America or in Europe, but also gave her a great taste for European living. It was a very parochial, genteel society, and she came to think of it and write about it as

sexually hypocritical and rather restrictive. Girls weren't educated. Girls were told to look the other way out of the carriage window for an adulterer it was riding past. And for a young girl of that era, she was evidently intended, and her rather chilling mother, Lucretia, intended that She was evidently intended to be a debutante, a wife, a mother, a hostess. Actually, all she wanted to do was read and write. She was socially very awkward and shy. And there's amazing stories of her as a little girl, even before she'd learned to read, insisting on having a printed book on her lap and making up stories out loud from this book.

And her mother would come in and say, Edith, you've got to come and have tea with these little girls. And she'd say, no, no, Mama, I've got to make up. So they clearly thought she was some kind of changeling. and this didn't do her well in the sort of social round of young women on the marriage market. She did marry quite late actually when she was 23 and that was a disaster, but that's a later story. But still in her childhood, she was not discouraged from writing. She published some verses when she was about 15 and 16 and she had a terrific education in the sense of reading. She didn't go to school.

That's right. But she was writing poems and writing plays and she used to write on the book. back of the wrapping paper. If the parcels came in brown wrapping paper, she'd take the wrapping paper and start scribbling on it. And it seemed like an unstoppable flow. And then it stopped after she got married when she was 23. And this marriage was clearly from the beginning a sexual disaster. There's a terrifying story of her asking her mother the facts of life the night before she was due to get married. And her mother sort of draws in her skirts and says, don't ask me these ridiculous questions. And so that was not a very great success. And he was a sort of affable,

older Bostonian gentleman, but it went badly wrong. But then she started to write. But let's get back to this New York society. They almost aped European upper middle class, lower aristocracy society. They were tribal. They were rich. They were interested in decorating their houses and in their houses. They're interested in giving each other dinner parties and going to each other's balls and going to the opera but only with each other. And they thought themselves at the apex of society. Well, it's very, yes, there's the 400, the sort of first families. And it is very tribal and it is very self-protective.

But of course what's happening between the 1860s and the 1880s when she's growing up is that it's changing. So what she sees later on and what's happening at the time is this little society trying to protect itself with all its conventions and its rituals. And actually what's happening is that new money is coming in and what people they consider to be very vulgar, like big money-making tycoons are coming in, and they're changing,

and all the nature of the parties are changing. And so this is a society which is sort of shifting even as you look at it. But most of the novel is about the gilded static nature of the society. Well, some of the novels are. Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Age of Innocence. Sure, Age of Innocence, absolutely. It's written in 1920 about the 1870s, so it's a long retrospect.

It's a historical novel. But some of the other novels are actually about the moments of change, the society begins to disintegrate. I may be sotted by the age of innocence. I only properly finished it yesterday. Couldn't matter to read more on the few pages because it was too interesting. Okay, Laura Rattray,

what was the range of her output, just generally? She's extraordinarily diverse, and that's often forgotten because what writer has an arsenal of novel hits as she does, Age of Innocence, as you're saying, customer the country, Ethan Frome and so on. But from a very early age,

she's working in a variety of genres. There's a huge amount of poetry. You mentioned that early volume she publishes verses, which is published privately when she's just 16. Many of the poem... Yes, I think her poetry, some of it is pedestrian at best. Other poetry is terrific. It's a great range of sonnets and dramatic monologues.

She gets some poems published in the Atlantic Monthly, partly through social connections, it has to be said. She has poems published in newspapers based on stories that she's read. For example, an early one about a child who's been committed to reformatory for some childish crime and ends up killing himself. And also plays. There's this whole series of plays that she writes well before she publishes her first novel. And he's extraordinary. Some of them are comedies of manners. Some of them are darker going down the social scale to, the people who make those leisure privileged lives possible.

And this evidence to suggest that actually at the beginning, she was pretty interested in being a playwright rather than a novelist. There's a book of interior design again before she publishes a novel. And that tends to get forgotten about because of partly her productivity and partly because of those hits. But throughout her career, she's working on a variety of projects at the same time. and that diversity continues. How does her life change when she settles in France?

France for war. And marries, which mine has given us a taste for this disastrous event. Yeah. Would you like ramp the far as everything being said? I don't think the marriage is a disaster from the beginning, is it? It becomes a disaster. And France represents to her escape on one hand. It's civilisation, its grown-upness,

it's the intellectual life. She speaks fluent French, of course, although by her own admission it's pure Louis Catoles, she says, a century or two out of date. France is hugely important for her in terms of finding a life, so much of her writing images of imprisonment and women who can't break out, who can't get free. And I think her escaping France was a big part of that equation.

Is there a sense just to return to this? because we've, as it were, given tasters twice. We've got to go into it. Her husband, as I understand it, was mentally ill. He was drunk a lot. He was very volatile. And they didn't get on at all. Hermione has given us some indication briskly

of the sexual difficulties that they had, not knowing what the hell was going on by the sound of it. And did that continue through a long marriage? 28 years, was it? It is a long marriage. Finally, they divorce in 1913. And again, she's grateful to France and their privacy laws that it's not splashed all over the papers.

as Hermione says, 12 years her senior and it becomes disastrous I mean I think anyone who embezzles $50,000 of your money and sets up home in Boston with a mistress it's not looking good You're supposed to spend it on chorus girls I love that detail

and various people being signed into hotels as Mrs Wharton who were not Edith Wharton So yes it certainly becomes a disaster and she's still uncomfortable about divorce Bridget Bennett

But what would she have read? She's not published. She doesn't, she has a 12-year break when she marries her husband. A lot is happening, but nothing is being published, even though she's besotted by the idea of writing. What would she be reading? How would she be lining her mind? As a young child, one of the things she says is that she was expressly,

more or less expressly prohibited from reading novels. So she had to ask her mother first if she wanted to read her novel, and her mother would usually say no. despite this she does despite this she does read some novels so we know that she reads George Eliot for example she reads Middlemarch

she makes Middlemarch one of the books that Newland Archer reads in the Age of Innocent and she reads incredibly widely indeed voraciously She knows Floberg Gerta on we go and on and she reads a lot

when she's younger she reads to a lot of evolutionary material so she reads Spencer and Darwin she reads T-8 Huxley, and she also reads Torstein-Vaublin, the economist, whose 1899 text, the theory of the leisure classes, could more or less be a kind of precursor to the age of innocence. In this book, it's a really important book, he suggests that instead of thinking about people's lives through statistics, what one should look at is how they act. So he thinks the leisure class, which is essentially the class of people that she's anatomising,

as a group who have taken over from feudal society. They practice a form of non-pecunary work, and they show how wealthy they are by what he calls conspicuous consumption, buying things, whatever those are, clothes for women, things for men, and conspicuous leisure, going to the opera, having dinner parties and so on. Laura mentioned her first book was on decorating a house,

decorating a house, and there's an awful lot of that in what I read. I'm sorry to keep repairing to it, but I'm going to keep referring to it. that's the way it is. And that's full of interior decoration. It's full of great details and dresses, the like of which I've never read about before, and

couldn't get my head around telling you the truth, but still they sound very luscious and you go to Paris to get your wedding gown. That's where you get your wedding dresses, you go to Paris, and so on. So there's a lot of that. There's an awful lot of that. I mean, there's a moment where Newland Archer imagines that he's somehow going to educate...

Newland Archer being the hero, being the hero, who marries May Welland. But actually, when they're on their honeymoon, she's very interested in buying her dresses in Paris. And this becomes a great theme for her. She's got to come back with the right clothing to demonstrate that she's got the right kind of wedding. Her first hit novel, if we can put it in that crude way,

in her head of Eden, Walton, but never mind, I've said it now, was the House of Merth. Can you tell us about that and why you thought it was such a great success, which it was? The House of Mirth is published in 1905, and it opens with this fantastic sequence, which takes place in New York, the railway station, where Lily Bart, the protagonist, beautiful 29-year-old woman, this is old, she should be married by now, but she's not,

is standing stockstill at the centre of the station. And the novel tells of the kind of dilemmas this beautiful woman has, she ought to have an appropriate marriage, but she can't quite bring herself to do it. And she hasn't got the money to do it, has she? She hasn't got the money not to do it. Well, she's well-born. She's well-born, but she doesn't have sufficient money.

So this is a dilemma for her, but she also can't bring herself to marry the boring figures she's supposed to marry, one of whom Percy Grice, his name says it all, collects objects, and she's worried she might become one of his collectibles. So she keeps resisting this, and it all ends very, very badly for her. And she has given poverty and despair and prescribed but lethal drugs. Yes. But in some kind of fantasy where she imagined she's holding on to a base,

that she isn't, of the working-class woman whose life she suddenly idealises. And in some ways, this is a slightly mawkish moment for the very wealthy Edith Wharton, who really doesn't know what the lives of people like that are like. But nonetheless, she, I think, I can see, heads are nodding or shaking around the table. They're shaking around the table. But to my mind, it's an odd moment in the law that. I'm not convinced by it, though it's a beautiful ending. But we can talk about that. So that's that story. And it, the, Scribner said it was the biggest seller they'd had, and he sold 140,000 copies.

She made half a million dollars in those days, in those terms. So goodness knows what it is today. And that really set her up in a big way. And quite right, too. It's a fantastic novel. Hermione, there's this paradox that the many paradoxes, many subtleties and nuances, but to get, I think, near the heart of it,

the paradox is that these women are incredibly wealthy, but they're not free. and they're quite powerful, but they don't have much effect. So can you just take that apart? It's so interesting what Bridget was saying about the reading, because one of the things that she's thinking about is anthropology, social anthropology. So she's turning herself in with a character like Lily Bart,

or a character like the amazingly monstrous Undine Sprague in custom of the country, or Elenka, the tragic heroine or sad, poignant heroine in the Age of Innocence. she's very involved with these characters, but it's as if she's also examining them as members of a species in a determinist universe, and she's read a lot about this kind of thing, you've read her Herbert Spencer and her Nietzsche and so on. And she sees them as not having ultimately free choice.

They may have ambitions, desires, good or ill, they may be greedy, they may be ruthless, they may be poignant and vulnerable, but they are creatures who are. are bound within this social system. And with Lily in the House of Mirth, you see her sliding down the slippery slope. And actually, if she hadn't, I'm sorry, we may be spoiling this for some people, but if she hadn't died at the end, you can see it might have turned into a sort of novel by Zola, where she would have become a prostitute, because there is this idea of the marriage

market being like a form of prostitution. Undine Sprague gets what she wants and succeeds. But she too is not free. She's described as a monstrously perfect result. of the system. But they're not free, but they have power. They have great power. They make things happen. Most of all, they stop things happening. They can make things happen and May Welland, the wife, the apparently innocent, demure wife in the age of innocence, is actually very powerful in terms of how her will in fact prevails through not saying things, through not letting her husband have his own way and run off with the beautiful Elenska. So she wins, actually. So there is a kind of power, but the power is always through subterfuge, through negotiation, through not saying things.

So there isn't the freedom of speaking out. Exactly, but there is a distinction and they do. It's true, and you're right, it is a paradox. I just wanted to pick up on this because I think the tribalism that she's understanding, the way in which she's dissecting this society through the fact that she sees it as a tribe, also allows her to unpick those things that don't have to be said, the ways in which people simply look at each other to communicate a whole host of things

about what's going on and why it needs to be stopped. And that is done brilliantly throughout the novel in scenes at the opera where people are looking and their understanding precisely what the social nuances are. Nothing has to be said. It's all unspoken. It's quite frightening. And it's terrifying.

And that's where a lot of the women have their power. It's through not saying but knowing. Laura and Laura Rattray One of her best known novels is The Age of Innocence. The listeners might have guessed by now, but still, no mind. And the main character is Newland Archer. Yes.

Let's start with him. He's wealthy. He's one of the great families. He's at the heart of this gilded group. How free is he? He's one of Wharton's male protagonists who's a thinker rather than a doer as we quite often see in some of his novels.

as he pronounces, makes these lofty statements, women ought to be free, as free as men are. He has the tag of a profession in terms of the law. But quite often, well, an early reviewer of Wharton said that all of her men were ladies with moustaches. And this reviewer wasn't sure whether the problem lay with Mrs. Wharton or the material she had to observe. And I think this has stayed with her, this idea that she's great at the women, not so. at the men. And I think quite often it's that the men actually don't get quite as much narrative attention. The Age of Innocence is one of the exceptions along with Ethan Frome. Some of those thinkers not doers are so frustrating. We've mentioned House of Mouth.

Lawrence Selden, who just can't do anything? Can he's banging on about the Republic of the Spirit? All well and good. Not really an option for a woman, Lily. But Newland, I think, there's such a poignancy there this idea that he's trapped in many ways he's trying to do the right thing and as time passes and you get that killer line at the end of the novel

where he was a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he dreamed of becoming and you see all those colours kind of fading But there is this paradox again isn't that that he's the freedom to enrove New York or the world indeed is the more

Wilf and Peter Barovia, to have any ideas he wants to talk to. And yet, any slightest deviation from the tram lines that are set down by this group of people, particularly by the women, and he holds back, he pulls back. Is that right? Amanda, you wanted to come in. No, I agree with you about the sadness of Newland Archer. And over and over again, it's not just the women who aren't free. It's the men who aren't free.

And there is a kind of, I wonder if it was her father, partly of this character. There's a sort of puzzled, bewildered, rather ineffectual, old-school guy who is often destroyed by other people, just hasn't got the guts and the oomph to succeed. I mean, one of them kills himself, in fact, in the custom of the country, and it's a heartbreaking characterization. You do see, don't you, that it's a system that's not working for women, not working for men in many cases either. And you get these lovely little moment, Lily Bart's father. It's a tiny scene, but when he loses the ability to earn, he becomes for his wife extinct. You know, he's wiped out.

It is. Again, this ruthless society. You get these lovely settings and fancy dinners, and then the narrative voice will come in and undercut it, like the scene with Ellen, where she was a tribeswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. She returned, the debaughty-de-be-divorced countess who comes back from Europe to, New York to seek solace and is ejected because she doesn't conform to their rules well enough. That's very crude, but it's on the right lines. Yeah, Ellen. And Newton falls for her just about the same time as he's asked May to hurry up and get married.

Yes, she's a risk to New York society in a way that obese old Granny Mingott is not. It's all right for her to be a rebel, but somebody like Ellen is a threat, and she ends up ruthlessly eliminated. Bridget. And I just wanted to add it. I mean, it's not all the men who aren't free. I'm thinking of the figure of Julius Beaufort, for example. He's a really interesting figure because he's not from this society. He's come over from England.

He's associated with scandalous mismanagement of money in somehow, and he's probably Jewish. Each of these things is really problematic in terms of the society within which he's moving. But he's also enormously wealthy, and that's a very good thing for everyone, because they need new money coming in, but they don't like it. He goes bust in the middle of the novel scandalously. at which point he loses everything, but he manages to hold on to his mistress.

He eventually marries her and appears to be very happy with her. That's one example of a happy marriage. And indeed, his daughter, who is illegitimate because he only married his mistress after he's gone past and after the daughter's been born, goes on to marry Newland Archer's son. And this is a very good example of the double standard that she's writing about. So if men have a disgrace or something terrible happens

or they commit adultery or they're seen with their mistreats or they go bankrupt and then make their money again, they can get back. If a woman steps outside the line, if she is seen to be visiting a bachelor flat in the afternoon, if she has committed adultery or has had an ugly divorce, she can come back 30 years later to New York when all around her has changed

and she is still going to be the woman who pays. Can we look at this? Bridget, can you tell us about this word innocence, the age of innocence? Yeah, it's really loaded, isn't it, in this novel? So the name, the title of the novel, is also the title of a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is a painting of a very young child, a female child, looking rosy and innocent with bare feet.

So it seems to be associated then with young girls. In that sense, we might think it's a neutral term, but actually in the novel it's far more than that. It's associated with the ways in which the young girls of this novel are deliberately kept from knowledge of everything, from sexual knowledge, from knowledge of reading, from imaginative knowledge, from anything that might make them independent or dynamic.

So it's a really problematic term. It's also a kind of term for ignorance as well. But there is a slightly nostalgic element to it too. Here's this novel written retrospectively by Edith Wharton, who's no longer living in New York, at the period of the... looking back on the 1870s, and slightly thinking there's a loss that has gone on too.

Things have changed. It's no longer the world I know. Many elements of this world are elements that I hated and had to move away from. But there are things, there's a kind of stability, there's a set of forms that I love, and they've gone. So it's slightly, there is a slight lament for an old version of the United States that's gone.

Is there any sense inside the novel you find this age of innocence, that you want to get rid of these double standards? Is there any sense that she's propagandising against the dull standards? She's not a propagandising kind of writer, and she doesn't like the idea of fiction as polemic or fiction as propaganda. She would never, for instance, have described herself as a feminist. I mean, there are many ways in which she's pretty old school, and in some ways not unlike her own mother.

But she clearly sees the damage that it does. I think one of the things that's very fascinating about Wharton as a professional, writer is that right into the 1930s and then her work is not so much read, she is seen to be very ruthless and strong on matters which a lot of fiction of the time did not air and did not write about. So just to give you one example of the tone, there's a story published in 1931 which begins, his wife had said, if you don't give her up, I'll throw myself from the roof. He had not given her up and his wife had thrown herself from the roof.

Now, this is not the kind of story that the polite magazine that she was going to publish in was sort of ready for, actually. And so although she's not polemical, she tells it like it is in terms of the horrendous damage that is done by these kinds of double standards and by these captive marriages.

Laura, as it were, I'd like to come to what she did in the First World War, but sort of taking on by indirections, from what Hermione has said. She wasn't a suffragetist. She didn't believe in women's rights. Can you develop this side of her, which must be very difficult for you all to admit to? Yes, slightly problematic.

There's a great line about how she doesn't believe in women's scholars, which is lovely as you're coming into work in the morning. She was a woman of her time, and she was tainted by the prejudices of her age, and I don't think we can get away from that. I think she thought that women mattered and mattered. as much as men mattered. I think that's a pretty secure bottom line. But as you say, she wasn't campaigning for women's suffrage.

And there's a lovely story where Mary Berenson, her friend, sends her a book called The Cause, on the history of the British suffrage movement. And her response is, the cause. Reading a book on the cause and that cause will require all my affection for you. And she goes on and makes very disparaging remarks about it. So was she out campaigning?

No, she had a circle of male friends. She also had female friends, but... But she didn't go out on the march like a lot of them were doing. No, she didn't at all. There's also hints of racism and anti-Semitism. Are they justified or not? I think when Wharton sort of comes back, there's a great urge to claim as this feminist icon

and to see no evil, hear no evil, nothing bad about her. There are comments that we would find offensive today. I think some falsely accuse her of, say, a portrait, Simrosdale in the House of Marth, which I don't think is anti-Semitic. I think she exposes the anti-Semitism of the society, including Lily's anti-Semitism. But is she perfect. No, she is not, and she is...

She does make some terrible remarks about... I mean, you know, she has absolutely no sense of putting, you know, that there might be black characters who might have a place in the American scene. She makes dreadful personal remarks about how no culture could ever come out of Harlem, that kind of thing. She makes some incredibly bigoted anti-Smitter. Well, no, she's a part of her class and time, but that's not an excuse. No, I mean, what happened in Harlem at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th?

Oh, well, she was completely out of the loop in terms of what was going on. But you're right, that when she comes to draw a very pronouncedly Jewish character in the House of Murth, who has a lot of unpleasant Jewish caricature features, nevertheless, he is, one of the most intelligent and actually rather sympathetic characters in the book. So it's mixed. Lauren, then for Frid. Yeah, Sim Rosdale in House of Mirth actually ends up by being the most compassionate figure in that novel and shows a much more support for Lily than, say, Lawrence Selden.

But, yes, Wharton is prejudiced. She is tainted by her time and she is a woman of her time. Extraordinary in many ways, but in other ways very much locked into that position. Bridget. And it would be very easy to read some of her novels and imagine that there isn't a world there that's absolutely being supported by working class characters. You know, by servants, by a whole array of people, including people of colour, who are more or less invisible to her. I think I'm a bit more feisty in the attack on Wharton for this. This, after all, is a woman who moves back to New York, buys herself a house and then buys the next door house for her servants to live in. She's wealthy. Yeah, no, no shame to her for the world.

being wealthy and she her life is constructed around her servant. She would send her servants ahead to her French houses to open them up and organise everything. I mean, you know, we're so used to this way of life. But she, but I think that in the writing, I would want to make the claim that she has a very acute and empathetic sense of what it is like to be, extremely poor, uneducated, underprivileged. We're missing out a great work, which is a short novella called Ethan Frome, which is set in the poor, rural New England countryside and where she deeply enters into the lives of these people. And that's not the only example of that.

There's a charwoman in the House of Earth who alters the whole plot. And you know, you just open the door on that woman's life for a second. But she really knows that woman. And I don't think she's quite as insensitive to these people as you're saying, Bridget. Laura, can you tell us about what she did in the First World War that was so acclaimed? Because we try and defend her here. You don't have to defend it. I mean, it's understanding, not defending, isn't it?

Nobody's attacking in a way. We're trying to understand what she was like. I think it has been used to actually attack her in the past, and she's pushed into this box, and it's one of the reasons we view her as a kind of safe conventional writer, which I think is doing her a great disservice. But in the war, this phenomenal contribution, she enters into it wholeheartedly,

full-blooded, industrial-scale fundraising. She's founding hostels for refugees, hospitals, for people recovering from TB. She goes to the war zone. She's reporting back on that. A lot of journalism coming out of this time because she's furious at America's perceived reluctance to come into the war and the neutrality.

She sees it very much, I think, in black and white terms. There's no nuance for her in this. It's a battle between civilization and brutality and evil. And she feels shamed by America's position in those first years. Can I switch back to another line? and Bridget, men have their own spaces in Wharton's books. I mean, in the age of innocence, Newland has his own study. He often goes to his study.

That's his space all the time. Do women have similar spaces, both real and metaphorical? Not to the degree that men have. So he has his library that he retreats to, and this is a space that's for him entirely, although two very interesting pivotal things take place there, each precipitated by his wife May. The first is that she comes in there, having had a long conversation with Ellen, we don't quite know what it's about.

Ellen is the man, sorry, Ellen is a woman he is in love with. He knew when she was young and he hasn't physically betrayed his wife with her, but emotionally he's betrayed her completely. That's right. And she's also May's cousin. And May turns to him and she says, you haven't kissed me yet today. and they have some kind of embrace and then we don't see what happens after that. In which she trembles? In which she trembles, that's right.

Two weeks later, having been to the opera and seen May on the other side of the opera house, the novel opened in the opera. May, he realizes, is wearing her wedding dress, very conventional, made up after the wedding. They come back to the house. Once again, they're in the library and she reveals to him that she's pregnant.

But that she's told Ellen she's pregnant two weeks previously when she wasn't pregnant. We then realise that that space of the library has also become the site in which she makes sure she becomes pregnant. It's very interesting. And this is partly, this is deeply manipulated because Ellen, who is about to form some sort of liaison with Newland, perhaps that or whatever would happen,

then says she must go back to Europe, she must get out of here, to preserve the innocence of the encrusted society, which she thought was heaven, turns out of a bit of a hell. And she says, one of the things Alan says is you can be surrounded by people all the time and be very lonely. So the women are constantly surrounded by people and constantly being looked at but also alone. Yeah, she says, can't you ever find a place to be on your own?

There's no privacy. And it's very interesting that whole question about privacy. There are lots of secrets. Women are keeping secrets all the time, but there's nowhere to be private in this world. One thing that's fascinating, I'll come to you, if you all, is the total acceptance. of a hierarchy. This particular family is rather more important than that particular family. If you're going to invite to their house or they come to your house,

especially in a particular bad part of the season, then it points up to you. And if they don't, it points down to you. And this is going on all the time. Yes, and it is, of course, a kind of snobbery. It's straightforward snobbery, isn't it? Yeah, straightforward snobbery. And one of the things, it's interesting. Again, it's a paradox.

One of the things that Wharton is constantly being accused of is being a terrible snob. And I would defend her against the kind of snobbery that she accused Proust of. When she was in France, she said, I don't want to meet Proust because he's a terrible snob. All he does is hang around the ritz and suck up to duchesses. And actually, Edith Wharton, although she was snobbish about travel and furniture and good friends and conversation, she would rather have had a conversation with a struggling writer than with a duke. So she's not exactly a snob in that way, although she does have some snobbery to her.

But in the novels, what she is doing is exposing the kind of snobbery, which says we only belong to each other, no one else must come in. And of course, what's happening, and you see this even more forcibly in the House of Merth and the custom of the country, is that people are coming in. There's no way of keeping these hierarchies absolutely fixed. Everything is shifting. And one of the things I think she's wonderful at is the unreality of the real world. So that things, you can suddenly look at this world that you think you're in and feel like a. ghost. Or she says it's like children playing in a graveyard at one point in age of innocence. You can get a sense, post-war sense of a haunted landscape of all these people who were so busy

living their lives and in a hundred years' time, everything they did will be forgotten. And she gives you that long view as well as the close view. Richard, you want to come in. Yeah, I'm just thinking about this snobbery. Ellen is brilliant at puncturing this. So at one point she's taken to meet. Helen is the Countess. We must keep reminding people. Ellen is the Countess.

The naughty woman has come from Europe. I've been about to get a divorce. Although she is originally from New York. Yes, I know. She's gone to New York, come back again. So she's taken to meet an English Duke, and she says at the end of it, God, he's the most boring man I've ever met.

And constantly, she's pointing out all the absurdities and pieces of nonsense that she's surrounded by. And Newland is horrified and excited by this. So if we're thinking about innocence in this way, there's a kind of question here. Is this a form of seduction? Or is she genuinely just thinking, God, they really are tedious?

which some of them indeed are. Are you entering into this discussion, Laura? Well, I'm just thinking how much more of her writing actually is about people lower down the social scale than I think we're admitting here. There's much more of that, you know, something like the Buna Sisters, where you see women just cast aside like waste material and stuff that hasn't been remembered. Some of the, again, the poetry and the plays,

I think there's a much greater range than we're perhaps acknowledging here. But that doesn't seem to have covered. into the major works, does it? Or it's just because we haven't gone around to reading. We can talk about that when we talk about it. Let me talk about it now. Why do you think that those sort of works have not been as cherished and as republished as the ones we've been discussing?

I think they're there, but not necessarily the major focus. Hermione mentions that the House of Muff, when Lily's sliding down that social scale and you do get that sort of community of kind of working women at the end and that sense of bonding. Something like Summer, which she writes during the work, war and she has a much less cultured heroine there and you see this cast of women in the background often with with disabilities and you see the the stunted restricted lives that

they're being forced to lead and I think there is such a sense of compassion coming into play there so I think it's there but partly again because there's such a body of work with Wharton sometimes you've got to look for it well Ethan Frome is a big star in her in her work and that's that's a novel of poverty and lack of privilege and lack of opportunity. But I think don't writers get typecast a bit, don't people want to go back to them for what has become the big popular hit? So there was a sort of expectation that she would, you went to her for a certain kind of novel. It's very interesting in the 1920s. She wrote seven books after the Age of Innocence. They're very little read, but they're very interesting attempts to keep pace with modernism

and what's happening in the 1920s. I think there's also in her early reputation this sense that she's often compared with Henry James. So look at her novels. A great friend of hers. She admired and then became terrific friends. Indeed. And she was very frustrated by this comparison, though she greatly admired his work. And there's a sense that she's often looked at as a novelist of manners,

who's interested in questions of innocence and knowledge as he is. And there's a brilliant, I mean, I'd want to kind of repudiate it to some degree, but she also does do this a bit. There's a brilliant short story she writes in about 1934, I think, called Roman Fever, that kind of takes on and rewrites his early work of 1873, Daisy Miller, and she provides it with a brilliant ending. In Daisy Miller, Daisy dies in the Coliseum, having been bitten by a mosquito, because she is transgressing out at night and shouldn't be.

In Roman fever, it's a very different story, and the last line of that is quite brilliantly ruthless. How far is she using her own life in these novels, particularly in the ones we've been talking about? Let's say House of Merth and Age of Innocence, how am I? Yes, it's a million dollar question. I mean, she doesn't like what she calls self-confession. Her autobiography is very guarded. She famously once said that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms,

and you only ever get to the first rooms, you never get to, no one ever gets to the secret heart of it. She doesn't, she disguises herself, we'd already talked about, her, you know, male characters being women with moustaches. She doesn't talk about herself ever in her books. She is extraordinarily formal and objective and cool. But pouring through these books, like a great powerful river, there is a great plangency and passion and emotion. And this is her own, these are her own feelings. I'll give you one example of how, well, maybe a couple of quick examples of how autobiographical she is in disguise. One of the other, is the story of Ethan Frome, which she wrote in the Rue de Varennes, in the Forborg, on the left

bank miles away from New England, but which was written at the time when her marriage was intolerable and her passionate midlife affair had just broken up. Those themes get into that story heavily disguised. And the other is Newland Archer. He's 57 when the novel ends. It's not, you wouldn't think it would be the end of a person's life. She's 57 when it comes out. The loneliness in him, the not having got what he wanted, the having sacrificed, the great happiness of his life. These are very personal feelings. So I think it's hard to find her, but she's there.

Bridget, how would you describe, and then to your Laura, how would you describe her legacy? I mean, like now. I think now one of the things she's admired for is her, as a great stylist. I think she's a brilliant stylist, construct sentences very well. I think she's thought of as a novelist of New York

to a very particular, kind of New York, because I think the focus is on those particular novels, rather than her much wider output, the output that Laura's been describing, that for whatever reason hasn't really been attended to. So I think a great novelist who ought to be more part of the canon, she's been not looked at as much as she should, because she's a woman writer, I'd argue. Laura? I think she's a much bolder, braver, riskier writer than she's given credit for.

And if you look at what are her themes, illegitimacy, assisted suicide out of wedlock pregnancy. It's all there and she's doing it while being hugely commercially successful and I think that's her great triumph. There's an interview she gives the year of her death when she comments on this and she says where's this violent and old lace things come from? She said, I was once considered a revolutionary writer and if you look at her work way back from 901, the Catholic Church is going mental at some of her work, seeing it as a as blasphemous and calling her evil. But even so, she gets sucked into this old Grandin thing.

Well, thank you very much, Laura Rattray, Bridget Bennett and Hermione Lee. Next week, in the first of two programmes either side of our 20th anniversary, on the 15th of October, we'll be asking, is Shakespeare history? We start with his reimagining of the English contagionates and the impact that's had, and thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material. from Melvin and his guests. When you were talking about France, Laura,

I wanted to talk more about that because I think that all too often she is thought of very much in American terms and quite rightly. But she did write about France as well as about America. And she has a deep, strong, passionate emotion for France with which she is always comparing America. So in her view, America is sort of infantile and childish and raw.

And France has got these deeply rooted traditions and ways of doing things. And she is besotted with France. She says, in during the war, if somebody told me to get out of my grave and speak for France, I think I would do it. And I think age of innocence, actually, the last word that Newland Archer says to Ellen is, I'll see you in Paris. and he doesn't see her in Paris. But I do think that the culture that's being described in Age of Innocence is sort of implicitly set against the culture of particularly France,

but of Europe too. So I think that's so important in her life. Can I add to that one of the novels that we didn't talk about, a novel that I loved The Reef, which is set in France, and it brings up so many of these themes, but also it has a very vulnerable in it, the very young governess, Sophie Vibe. who doesn't have a space of her own, has no privacy,

her vulnerability is precisely because she has to work for a living and comes into a household where she's just had an affair, unbeknownst to her, well, she knows she's had an affair, but she doesn't realise that the person with whom she's had an affair is the man who is going to marry her employer, a woman, and that she is going to be the governess for this woman's daughter. She has no idea of this, but then she also gets involved, doesn't she with the woman's son in some manner?

Yes, it's very complicated. It's very complicated. And talk about autobiography, as we were talking about how autobiographical she is, this novel was written straight after the end of her passionate midlife affair with this very caddish, bisexual, unreliable lover. And when she writes this novel, she gets the lover to sort of fact-check it. Would you like to have a look at this and see whether you think I've got the emotion? I know this is a very crude statement, Hermione,

but do you think she could be said she didn't have much luck with men? I think we could say that. She had great luck with friendships. With friendships, yes. She kept her friendships and people like Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark later on and some of the young men she got fond of in England and Henry James.

These are deep true friendships and they do last. She's not quite so eloquent about her female friends, is she? No, but they are there, aren't they? and they are a rock that she turns to at times, very much so, who also acts as her agent in many ways and does a lot of work for her. Can I say what I wanted to talk about, Alvin? One of the reasons she's rich, certainly is she comes from inherited wealth, but one of the reasons she's rich is because she makes money from her writing

and she talks about writing as her business as well as her passion. She doesn't want to be read by three people and fall into the literary abyss. she wants to be out there and she's sustaining a career writing just about every day of her life until the day she drops she's leaving behind the buccaneers the unfinished novel which is published posthumously and I'd also like to say

she's many things but I think she's also a modernist writer which we don't often acknowledge you look at something like Ethan Frome where the narrative veracity of that whole short novel is just dangling by a thread something like House of Marth where the text starts to spiral out of control. So all the things that we would readily concede as modernism in other writers is somehow denied her.

And we hear of the great spats that she has with some of the modernist writers. She sees an article about Hemingway where the review is saying that he's inventing a new language for everyone. And she writes to, I think it's Berenson, isn't she it? And she just said, have you seen this article such? Rivel makes me despair. So she's kind of, in the 20s, she's on the one hand at the height of her powers earns more money than she ever has, but also that's the vulnerable period where she starts to be regarded as a bit of an old-fashioned writer. But she did pound books out,

which I approve of course. She was 48 books in 48 years. And she was tremendously demanding with her publishers. She changed publishers halfway through. She kept her very beady eye on what the books looked like She didn't want to have American spelling in her books She wanted to have English spelling Every single detail And she would get very haughty with them If she didn't find copies in the bookshops

You know that thing that authors are always doing I went to the book shop There aren't any copies of my book So she would immediately write them long letters But it's very interesting That thing about fame and money and success And at the same time high standards So she's constantly having these debates

with her dear friend Walter Berry, for instance, about if you are, can you be very good and can you be very popular at the same time? You know, can you keep up standards of high art and be subtle and discriminating and brilliant and at the same time have a huge audience? She did, actually. We talked a little bit about her reading what she read,

but I did want to say something about Edgerton Winthrop, who was a friend who gave her instruction on how to read, And I think one thing I'd say about her is what's important to is how she went about reading. So she read in a serious way. She read slowly and attentively. She thought about what she was writing subsequently. And that form of thinking about reading is an important process that you do in a very serious, committed way, allowed her to develop a facility for understanding Spencer and Darwin and Vablyn

and those people whose work she puts to such brilliant effect in her novels. And she's really good at languages as well. Italian, German, French, fluent, self-taught pretty much. Amazing, actually. It is amazing. That's from my own. And I think the producer is coming in to terminate this conversation. Yes, Simon.

Would you like tea or coffee? What would you do to thwart and drink? She never drank wine, so she didn't know whether her own wine was any good or not. So her guess we're always saying, wine's not very good. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. If I told you you're surrounded by a kind of. hidden wiring, a system so complete it affects almost everything you do. What would you think? Well, you are. It's called capitalism, and it's all around you. This is capitalism is a new podcast,

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