“... Fine Girl, Kiss Me!’ – used as the title for Part Two of the book. For decades, adaptations of Edith Wharton and Jane Austen books for films made me feel the way others might feel about watching intestinal surgery, and I thought poorly of the female friends who took me to these films. I was in my thirties before I even read those writers, whom I now ...”

“... Roosevelt (F.D.), Henry Ford, Asquith, Charlie Chaplin, J.M. Barrie, Churchill, Henry James, Edith Wharton, kings and queens and Mahatma Gandhi. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand spent a weekend there not long before his assassination. By the 1930s, the guest list – both at Cliveden and in St James’s Square – had evolved. Now, the Astors frequently ...”

“... authors Janet Ross and Violet Paget (penname Vernon Lee); and streams of summer visitors including Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West. Though isolated from other children, and oppressed by a ‘long and dreary dynasty’ of governesses, her childhood ‘was not unhappy; it was merely disconcerting, in its swift alternations between excitement and ...”

“... strength of the biography is its interweaving of private and public lives; here the milieu of Edith Wharton and Henry James is rendered whole, no longer shorn of its economic base – the working world of Newland Archer or Caspar Goodwood. The public life is described clearly and persuasively, even for a reader largely ignorant of stocks and ...”

“... socialite Isabelle McClung, for whom, she declared, all her books had been written, and the editor Edith Lewis, who lived with her for 39 years.In the valley between major biographies, we often get more personal, soft-focus ones, which centre on smaller, more manageable aspects of the life and work. The late 1980s yielded three tomes in quick ...”

“... in tow and Elizabeth Arden struggled ‘to find a pathway out of Toronto’. It was also the year Edith Wharton published The House of Mirth, in which the lines slowly appearing on her heroine’s face play a central part in the drama. Lily Bart is aware that it is not prudent to indulge in ‘a mood of irritability’ because ‘she knew that such ...”

“... Isabel the orphan has to become yet another child of the remarkably polyphiloprogenitive Emerson. Edith Wharton, inevitably, displays a ‘classic instance of the anxiety of influence’ in her relation to James. At these moments the self-propelling magic Bloomschtick often seems to whizz right on past its subject matter.Many American authors just ...”

“... female oppressor of her youth: Brontë’s description fairly seethes with murderous venom. Edith Wharton heroines, steely girls on the make such as Lily Bart or Undine Spragg, routinely anathematise the hypocritical society matrons who obstruct their passage to wealth and status: their aversion seems grounded in ...”

“... scorned only for his unrelieved vulgarity. The reaction to him wasn’t the antique snobbery Edith Wharton dissected in her society novels, but the worldly perspicacity of New Yorkers high and low. Trump’s quest for respectability only deepened his problems. It wasn’t that he had missed his moment like the passive Newland Archer in The Age of ...”

“... and about the influence of Whitman on others, including Henry James – who read Whitman, he told Edith Wharton, in ‘a mood of subdued ecstasy’ – and Hopkins, who wrote: ‘I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any man living.’ ‘Hopkins must have been referring,’ Matthiessen writes, ‘to Whitman’s ...”

“... be used as a case-history and the inclusion of this chapter is never justified. Some discussion of Edith Wharton’s story ‘Autres Temps’ starts out quite promisingly but is used as a vehicle for family gossip: it turns into an interview with a woman on whose divorced grandmother Wharton based her story. We are then ...”

“... introduced him to Claire, and instead of the customary stop and chat she frosted by him like some Edith Wharton matriarch at opera intermission. Sensing a bad moon rising, Roth made getaway tracks for the Jersey Shore, stopping on the way to visit his parents’ graves. Leaving a Doll’s House wouldn’t live up to its prize fight build-up but delivered ...”

“... in the 1890s can be seen from the tableaux enacted by New York’s leading society beauties in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (published in 1905, but set about a decade earlier), in which Carry Fisher, ‘with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of her eyes, the provocation of her frankly painted smile’, presumably assisted by a good ...”

“... a useful potted chronology of English translations of Sappho, up to and including Dr Henry Wharton’s highly influential Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (1885). The much-translated (and notoriously strange) Fragment 31 – quoted below in Anne Carson’s closely literal modern version – comes in for particular ...”

“... without ever being great himself.’ On Howells’s successor in the genteel tradition: ‘Edith Wharton’s great subject should have been the biography of her own class, for her education and training had given her alone in her literary generation the best access to it. But the very significance of that education was her inability to transcend ...”