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A Backward Glance [An Autobiography] eBook Edith Wharton

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A Backward Glance is the autobiography of Pulitzer-winning American writer Edith Wharton. Through her own worlds we learn about her life, her background, her companions and contemporaries, about her travels and her literary development.

A Backward Glance [An Autobiography] eBook Edith Wharton

It was a tough choice between saying "It's O.K." and "I like it." At too many points, it is a biography of Henry James. Mrs. Wharton had a hard-on for Mr.James. She was also largely enamoured of the gentlemen in her life who were NOT her husband. She admits to not being a "cause" person, yet she came away championed by organizations who believed she was a mover and shaker. It seems to me that a lot of people under her nominal leadership did the heavy lifting. She may have been good at cajoling people better than she, to be the prime infrastructure which supported and moved causes such as the War Relief efforts, etc.

This book is at its best when it is in her short story mode and describing the identities of New York, Paris, Italy, etc. When Mrs. Wharton describes countryside, cityscape, manners, etc., this book is at its best. It conjures up populated visions of the dining room, the drawing room and the library at Downtown Abbey.

The book is too repetitive and too long in its lists of "who's who" type names that take paragraphs of space.

Mrs. Wharton experienced much good luck and much good fortune in her life and times. She was rarely if ever in a predicament (even it meant the chauffeur sleeping in a frigid automobile). A lot of deference was shown to her, that certainly would not be displayed at the end of the 20th Century and the start of the 21st. She now would more likely be called out as a "Vanity Fair" name-dropper. Europe was much smaller in Mrs. Wharton's time, and it seems that she could hardly step out of any of her front doorsteps without tripping over a king, a Sir, a Lord, a Comtesse, a Secretary or an ambassador. They appeared on every streetcorner. Most of the world's population is now far removed from these lofty 1 and 2%ers.

"A Backward Glance" is, for the most part, a quick, easy read. That is good because it allows readers to get on to reading Mrs. Wharton's better short stories, novellas and novels AND biographies of her by others.

Product details File Size 686 KB Print Length 269 pages Simultaneous Device Usage Unlimited Publisher Kaf Publishing (June 13, 2012) Publication Date June 13, 2012 Sold by  Digital Services LLC Language English ASIN B008BX2VS2

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A Backward Glance [An Autobiography] eBook Edith Wharton Reviews

I recommended this book to my book club after reading the opening vignette and sorely regretted it. Nobody in the book club finished it because after about the first 20 pages it could better be described as "Edith Wharton Drops Names" -- I would recommend it to anybody who is really fascinated by Wharton or even better, Henry James, or those who would enjoy detailed accounts of literary society in London and Paris in the early 20th Century-- but I would read it if you are expecting many witty insightful anecdotes from the author's life. It reads sort of like a 5 hours Academy Awards speech, but manages to skip over all of the most interesting (sordid) parts of Ms. Wharton's life.
Both as a reader and as a student of design and decoration, I turned to this book to discover Wharton on her own terms. The early years tend to the quaint reminiscences and family history that don't much surprise. Her story becomes more compelling as the 19th century ends and the mature woman emerges.

There's plenty to entertain, though. I found her stories of early "motoring" in the Berkshires of Massachusetts illuminating and fun - for instance her observation that the automobile opened up an entirely new range (both in terms of miles traveled and sights seen) of day trip, and the excitement that provided.

I was interested to read how the ten years creating and living at The Mount, her famous house near Lenox MA received rather short, if affectionate, mention in the text. I've always taken her book with Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses, to be a defining work not just for decorators and the history of American interior design, but for her as well. Now I sense better how much of that book is Codman put into her words. Still, later in the book she frequently recalls those days, especially the motoring, and the trips they took through the country and into the mountains provide much of the rich background in novels like Summer and Ethan Frome - works she herself rates highly.

It may be that the European setting of much of the 20th century years makes the book take off at that point, but it's also the work she does in that era, and, necessarily, the people that fame brings into her life. Her friendship with Henry James is paramount among these, and the poignancy with which she writes about his last years (during WWI) and her regretted neglect of him at the end (she was in Paris, while he was in England) is moving. When, out of loyalty to his adopted England and before America joined the war, James renounces his American citizenship and officially becomes an Englishman, she thought it a mistake. "Not knowing what to say I refrained from writing to him; and I regret it now, for I think the act comforted him, and it deeply touched his old friends in England."

There is so much of value about writing and regret and achievement in the 2nd half of the book. Wharton provides insights into character development and the role of readers and critics in the writer's life. She's frank about the sense that she and her contemporaries were attacked when new for being radical, and when established for being quaint. Her own development as a writer is illumined by the changes the world was undergoing at the time - from travel in carriages to the independence of automobiles and expanded, faster rail service; from the Wright brothers experiments to warplanes and, though not mentioned, the passenger air travel available by the time she wrote this memoir The sense of the rapid change in the lives of women remains rather unspoken but still one of the elements affecting her own existence. (Of course, she also clearly believed her own generation in New York to be a turning point from the old-fashioned ways of a slower, duller city that preceded.)

So, for Wharton fans, for WWI aficionados, and for the rest of you who find some attraction here - go for it. The writing is obviously expert, the observations sound or, when not, provocative.
It was a tough choice between saying "It's O.K." and "I like it." At too many points, it is a biography of Henry James. Mrs. Wharton had a hard-on for Mr.James. She was also largely enamoured of the gentlemen in her life who were NOT her husband. She admits to not being a "cause" person, yet she came away championed by organizations who believed she was a mover and shaker. It seems to me that a lot of people under her nominal leadership did the heavy lifting. She may have been good at cajoling people better than she, to be the prime infrastructure which supported and moved causes such as the War Relief efforts, etc.

This book is at its best when it is in her short story mode and describing the identities of New York, Paris, Italy, etc. When Mrs. Wharton describes countryside, cityscape, manners, etc., this book is at its best. It conjures up populated visions of the dining room, the drawing room and the library at Downtown Abbey.

The book is too repetitive and too long in its lists of "who's who" type names that take paragraphs of space.

Mrs. Wharton experienced much good luck and much good fortune in her life and times. She was rarely if ever in a predicament (even it meant the chauffeur sleeping in a frigid automobile). A lot of deference was shown to her, that certainly would not be displayed at the end of the 20th Century and the start of the 21st. She now would more likely be called out as a "Vanity Fair" name-dropper. Europe was much smaller in Mrs. Wharton's time, and it seems that she could hardly step out of any of her front doorsteps without tripping over a king, a Sir, a Lord, a Comtesse, a Secretary or an ambassador. They appeared on every streetcorner. Most of the world's population is now far removed from these lofty 1 and 2%ers.

"A Backward Glance" is, for the most part, a quick, easy read. That is good because it allows readers to get on to reading Mrs. Wharton's better short stories, novellas and novels AND biographies of her by others.