Not lonely in the City of Light

There's a lot to dream about in this past weekend's New York Times travel piece on Edith Wharton in Paris, a city she fled to amid the wreckage of her marriage, conducted an affair in using tourism as her cover (smart!) and outside of which she is now buried. It does, however, spoil the end of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, so consider yourself warned.

I finished the NYRB collection of Edith Wharton's New York stories a few weeks ago, and though all but its ultimate story (the excellent "Roman Fever") take place on this side of the Atlantic, having read it sheds a lot of light on why Wharton, who was born in New York, would want to separate herself from the social whirl. I had to return it to the library before I had a chance to write about it, but I'm thinking of one story in particular in which a woman who was forced to leave for Europe during a nasty divorce returns to New York for her daughter's second wedding. The stigma over ending a marriage has been erased in a generation, but nevertheless she chooses the Continent, where she can live without scrutiny. With a little sadness, but not much, she orders her trunks be packed.

Wharton's visits must have been tremendously circumscribed even with the relative freedom she found there, but she had the wherewithal to choose, and she chose Paris. Times writer Elaine Sciolino describes her eating dinner with her lover in neighborhoods which for her stood for “the end of the earth ... where there is bad food & no chance of meeting acquaintances.” The balls and ritual leaving of calling cards look like a lark to us, but conceal that these women were almost never alone upon reaching adulthood. (This is the primary weakness of Anna Godbersen's Gilded Age YA series THE LUXE, the mechanics of whose plots require that its teenage characters manage to slip away from everyone to accomplish their goals.) True, attachment parenting hadn't been invented yet, but the hours they didn't spend with their kids were filled with parlor visits and servant directions. Letter-writing and the last months of pregnancy were probably their only respite from having to perform socially; in Europe, there were fewer people to visit.

'Tis the season to travel through books when you can't get away otherwise. (Anyone know of a good book set in Washington state?) This post should also remind me that I own Hermione Lee's Wharton biography, mentioned in the article, and haven't read it yet; maybe in a few months.