Have you read AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY EDITH WHARTON A BACKWARD GLANCE? I’m not sure how this book became mine, but I started reading it recently. It’s a gentle book to read before sleeping. It’s written lightly – hovering on the surface – at least so far. Edith Wharton was born in 1862, and if you have any inclination to glimpse how the rich lived in New York City, the surrounding areas, and abroad at that period, you’ll like this book. She doesn’t weigh the reader down with problems of any kind, which makes reading before bed pleasant, and yet the book has substance and through her eyes we gain insight into how things were then.
She knew the “important” people of those times, and comments on those associations, always skimming the surface. She appreciated the fact that she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and her remembrances are light and airy, at least in book form, even when she writes about loss of money, death,, war, etc. However, as a person she was “impossibly fussy” regarding just about everything concerning herself, so says Louis Auchincloss who wrote the Introduction. This is a sentence in his Introduction: “What room was there for the second rate in books, pictures, flowers, excursions, meals, friends, when the first rate was there to be culled?” And in the book she suggests this, more or less, about herself.
The “impossibly fussy” in her possibly gave us her wonderful stories.