Books, Arts & Manners: Late Bloomer

The Letters of Edith Wharton, edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (Scribner’s, 654 pp„ $29.95)

Aside from one letter written when she was 12, no correspondence of Edith Wharton (1862-1937) survives before that to her publishers twenty years later. Her first surviving private letters date from six years later still, when she was 38. Yet in spite of this slow beginning, about four thousand of her letters (not counting business correspondence) are extant. Edith Wharton’s letters, like other aspects of her life, show a striking rise in tempo and vivacity as she reached her forties—a pace that then continued for twenty years.

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Charles Nicol

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The Letters of Edith Wharton, edited by R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (Scribner’s, 654 pp„ $29.95)

Aside from one letter written when she was 12, no correspondence of Edith Wharton (1862-1937) survives before that to her publishers twenty years later. Her first surviving private letters date from six years later still, when she was 38. Yet in spite of this slow beginning, about four thousand of her letters (not counting business correspondence) are extant. Edith Wharton’s letters, like other aspects of her life, show a striking rise in tempo and vivacity as she reached her forties—a pace that then continued for twenty years.