No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton

Benstock ( Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940 ) here presents a comprehensive portrait of the gifted writer; born into a prominent New York family, Edith Jones (1862-1937) married Edward Wharton in 1885 and embarked on life as a society matron. The author asks provocatively, ``How did the frightened debutante become the social chronicler of her age?'' Benstock's engrossing response draws extensively on unpublished materials to detail Wharton's dramatic metamorphosis into the successful author whose fiction ( House of Mirth , 1905) exposed the hypocrisies of her class. Wharton traveled abroad and lived for many years in France, where her love affair with Morton Fullerton provided a passionate escape from her difficult marriage. Her husband's unpredictable behavior--he was manic-depressive--precipitated a divorce in 1913. Wharton's close circle of intellectual friends, including writer Henry James, encouraged and sustained her. Despite bouts of debilitating respiratory illness, she wrote prolifically and won the Pulitzer Prize for Age of Innocence (1920). Photos not seen by PW . (July)