the age of desire

Speaking of Edith Wharton, Jennie Fields' The Age of Desire (2012) draws back the heavy velvet drapes of decorum by novelizing aspects of Edith's life and loves.  Wharton, of course, was a fixed member of the upper crust society she portrayed in fiction, thereby using its corseting, restrictive influence as a means of literary liberation.  In The Age of Desire, much of the focus is on Edith's unfulfilling marriage to portly, jovial Teddy Wharton, who was twelve years older and more of a gentleman farmer-type than an aesthete.  Edith and Teddy did get along fairly well at times, but the marriage was strained by a lack of sexual connection.  Edith felt little for her husband romantically and, after a while, Teddy began to turn to other women to fill those needs.

Edith's intellectual and artistic interests were also beyond Teddy's general purview.  When Edith met American journalist Morton Fullerton in Paris, there was a spark of both physical and mental attraction that developed into an intense affair.  Fullerton was younger than then fortyish-Edith and had a bit of a reputation as a player, with both sexes.  Still, Edith seemed to realize that though it would be an overwhelming and troubling relationship, she needed to go through this ring of fire with Fullerton. The characters in her novels, namely Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence and Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, suppressed passions in order to keep within a proper code of social behavior -- Archer remaining in a loveless marriage and Lily eventually succumbing to the permanent oblivion of a chloral hydrate overdose.  Edith was more willing to take the emotional and moral risk of pursuing her own romantic involvement, although interestingly enough, The Age of Innocence was published almost two decades after her affair with Fullerton.

With a framework of Edith's true-life biographical detail and quotes from letters written to Fullerton, The Age of Desire offers a complex and intimate portrait of one of literature's grande dames.  Some may find such intimacy unsettling, while others may be more intrigued by this glimpse of Edith as a living, breathing, yearning, and flawed woman.  The life of Anna Bahlmann, Edith's secretary and confidante, is also part of The Age of Desire; Anna is of another class and tirelessly earnest in her devotion to Edith, and her character is quite compelling.  Furthermore, Fields manages to portray Edith's troubled husband Teddy Wharton in a sympathetic light, though he too is full of flaws and bad impulses.

Some reviewers of The Age of Desire noted instances of dialogue or behavior seeming too modern for the era, but in the larger scope of the novel's purpose, that can be indulged.  The prose itself flows elegantly in a Whartonesque manner, with a resulting view of Edith balancing identities as a woman of her day, a writer, and a human being, and not just a frosty book jacket photograph of one of America's literary greats.