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The social fabric fascinated her even as a little girl. At eleven, she started her first novel, beginning: " 'Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?' said Mrs. Tompkins. 'If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.' " (On which her mother commented: "Drawing-rooms are always tidy.") Soon she was dispatching poems to Scribner's Magazine with her calling card attached, and when she began to be published she learned her first hard truth about old New York society: it had no use for brainy women. "My literary success," she wrote, "puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them. None of my relations ever spoke to me of my books, either to praise or blame—they simply ignored them." Her marriage, at 23, to Boston Banker Edward Wharton, did not improve matters: "I was a failure in Boston because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable."
Best Remembered. She was not a failure in Europe. Starting in the 1880s, she spent nearly all her time abroad, ostensibly for her husband's health (he was a neurasthenic). Her idol was Henry James, and of the famous people she met, he is the one she remembered best —the one with whom, as James put it, she was "more and more never apart." Intentionally or not, she makes him out to be a buffoon. He was so convinced of his own poverty, she recalls, that when guests visited him at his home outside London, "the dreary pudding or pie of which a quarter or half had been consumed at dinner reappeared on the table the next day with its ravages unrepaired." He had a "passion for motoring," and he indulged it "to the last drop of petrol of any visitor's car." He was a hypochondriac and a fussbudget and noticeably thin-skinned where criticism of his work was concerned. But he was also the "greatest talker" she had ever met.
If the portrait of James seems incomplete, it is because Edith Wharton was a lady, and there are things a lady never tells. She makes no mention, for instance, of how unhappy her marriage was (her husband, said a friend, was "more an equerry than an equal") or how it ended after 28 years in divorce when her husband was finally declared insane and Henry James counseled her to "continue making the movements of life." And although she mentions a Washington lawyer named Walter Berry as a valued friend and literary adviser, she never hints that she was in love with him during and after her marriage or that she had requested that she be buried by him in the cemetery at Versailles (as she finally was when she died in 1937 at 75).
The end of A Backward Glance describes instead the last years in France, when she was already a legend, hostess to most of France's literary lights (although she never sought out Proust, whose work she admired, because she suspected him of being a "climber"). Her enormous output (42 novels) yielded her easily $75,000 a year. Yet the feeling of nonbelonging, she confesses, never really left her. Looking back, she saw herself as the last survivor of a civilization "as remote as Atlantis or the lowest layer of Schliemann's Troy."