Edith Wharton Author:R. W. B. Lewis "Working with hitherto untapped materials, [Lewis] has produced a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in the shade during her life...An expansive, elegant biography--one that can stand as literature, if nothing else--of a brilliant, independent woman." --Richard R. Lingeman, The New Y... more »ork Times
"Lewis has taken the stays off Wharton and has shown her as she was--brilliant, complex, witty, tough and sexy. This is not only a superb literary biography, but also a fascinating, detail-crammed evocation of life among the gifted, the affluent, and the powerful...A formidable woman." --Library Journal
"This is a masterly biography. It...should send a great many readers back to [Wharton's] books. Like all the best biographies, Lewis's is particularly fine in its descriptions of places and persons important to his subject. But most important, we take away a new appreciation of Edith Wharton as a passionate human being." --Newsweek
"Exhaustive in its scholarship, discerning in its literary judgments, sensible in its theorizing, [Edith Wharton] merits the adjective all biographies aspire to: definitive." --Robert F. Moss, Saturday Review« less