Labels: I heart EW, shameless self-promotion

By the 1920s, though, Wharton began to question the moral aims of modern science, particularly its ambition to relieve men of pain and suffering. She was distrustful of a "world that believed in panaceas." As she warned one would-be revolutionary, "The evils you rightly satirize will be replaced by others more harmful to any sort of civilized living." This warning would serve as the theme of her Jazz Age novels: The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), Twilight Sleep, and The Children (1928). In each, she would depict a set of free-thinking moderns who believe they have "settled in advance all social, religious and moral problems," yet still come "to grief over the same old human difficulties."

Edith Wharton, the massive new biography by Oxford English professor Hermione Lee, is the story of success: how Lee's formidable heroine survived a painful childhood, a disastrous marriage, an only slightly less disastrous love affair, repeated bouts of depression and illness, and the German occupation. Through it all, Wharton remained unflappable. Just two months before her death, she paid a visit to a friend and collaborator, the architect Ogden Codman, to discuss a new edition of their The Decoration of Houses (one of Wharton's 48 books). "Everyone was on jump all the time," Codman complained of his frail but nevertheless commanding guest. Only a few days after she arrived, Wharton suffered a heart attack. As she was carried into the ambulance, she admonished her host: "This will teach you not to ask decrepit old ladies to stay."