
I'm joining in @Graywacke 's #WhartonBuddyRead for Jan/Feb 😁
Happy NYE 🥂

I'm joining in @Graywacke 's #WhartonBuddyRead for Jan/Feb 😁
Happy NYE 🥂

#WhartonBuddyRead #ChunksterJunior Got this brick out of the library today hoping to join in the fun !

repost for @Graywacke
#whartonbuddyread
Who is up for Lee‘s biography of Edith Wharton? It‘s a chunkster (pictured above next to a 6 lb cat). While the book has 900 pages, many are notes. So a mere 760 pages of narrative. Comment if you want to join.
Proposed discussion schedule:
January 24: Chapters 1-4
January 31: Chapters 5-8
February 7: Chapters 9-11
February 14: Chapters 12-14
February 21: Chapters 15-17
February 28: Chapters 18-20

#whartonbuddyread
Who is up for Hermione Lee‘s biography of Edith Wharton? It‘s a chunkster (pictured above next to a 6 lb cat for size). While the book has 900 pages, many are notes. So a mere 760 pages of narrative. Comment if you want to join.
Proposed discussion schedule:
January 24: Chapters 1-4
January 31: Chapters 5-8
February 7: Chapters 9-11
February 14: Chapters 12-14
February 21: Chapters 15-17
February 28: Chapters 18-20

Infamously unrevealing, but Wharton‘s voice was gorgeous. Her prose magnificent. What she does tell us, including extensively about Henry James, is magical. All of it. She captures a world that existed before WWI, the experience of that war, and her personal devastation afterwards as she realizes that pre-war world is lost.
I wrote a long review here: https://www.librarything.com/work/46322/reviews/261461607
#whartonbuddyread

A Backward Glance
Chapter XII widening waters
Chapter XIII The War
Chapter XIV And After
#whartonbuddyread
I didn‘t realize how much the war broke Wharton. Nor how much great stuff she wrote during and in its wake. Arguably, she never wrote as well after this stage.
What were thoughts on Whartons take before during and after WWI? And on the book as a whole (published 1934)?

Wrong time period, but at least she‘s in Paris 👆
A Backward Glance
#whartonbuddyread
Today:
IX The Secret Garden
X London
XI Paris
Dec 13: finish
On writing House of Mirth
“The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals.”
I‘m smitten all. What are your thoughts?

A Backward Glance - VI-VIII
(Next, Dec 6 IX-XI)
#whartonbuddyread
Wharton‘s early works, through House of Mirth, but more about her “inner group” - with Walter Berry, and a magical section on Henry James:
“these elaborate hesitancies…were like a cobweb bridge flung from his mind to theirs, an invisible passage over which one knew that silver-footed ironies, veiled jokes, tiptoe malices, were stealing to explode a huge laugh at one's feet.”

👆Land‘s End - Wharton‘s Newport RI home
A Backward Glance - Chapters I-V
(Next week, Nov 29, chapters VI-VIII )
Before Newport, there is Rome, Alhambra, Paris, Bad Wildbad (Germany), old brownstone Manhattan, Florence and a yacht tour of the Aegean. We also meet Egerton Winthrop, Ogden Codman, Walter Berry, and kinda/sorta Mr. Wharton. Lush stuff, presented as natural and even middle class. The leisure class world. Thoughts?