Charleston Festival - Hermione Lee

Edith Wharton began her writing career aged eleven with a novel that began, "Oh, how do you do, Mrs Brown? ... If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room." But showing it to her mother, a stately New York matron, for critical appraisal, she was met with the dismissive reply, "Drawing-rooms are always tidy." Many years later the now best-selling Wharton would recall this event as her first creative blow (and perhaps the reason that she waited thirty years to pursue a literary career). I am told all this, down the line, by Hermione Lee, Wharton’s most recent biographer, who will be talking on the subject at the Charleston Festival. “She was always rather mean about her mother”, says Lee. “She obviously had a terrible relationship with her and I think she was a little afraid of turning out like her. She was quite fierce.”
Lee’s book has been billed as a counter to the stereotype of Wharton as a genteel chronicler of New York society, but, as I put it to her, from reading her fiction, it is hard to see where that stereotype has come from. “Yes”, agrees Lee. “It’s true. When you look at her fiction, she is savage and sharp about the society that she grew up in. I think some of the stereotype may have come out of the movie adaptations. People have rather too readily assumed that she is identical to the people that she writes about. But actually she felt very separate and related very much more to European culture. If you look at all her work, she is sometimes autobiographical but more often very objective and analytical.”