Why a Booktrail?
Early 1900s: While novelist Edith Wharton writes of grand love affairs, she has yet to experience her own. This is the story of her life, behind her words and pages
The Age of Desire
What you need to know before your trail
While novelist Edith Wharton writes of grand love affairs, she has yet to experience her own. Her marriage is more platonic than passionate and her closest relationship is with her literary secretary, Anna Bahlmann.
Then Edith meets dashing Morton Fullerton, and her life is at last opened to the world of the sensual. But in giving in to the temptation of their illicit liaison, Edith could lose everything else she holds dear…
Travel Guide
Paris
Paris is the main setting for the novel and is where the insights into Wharton’s writing life are the most insightful showing the reader the international milieu in which she moved. Henry James makes several appearances and there is a tour from one artistic salon to another. Travels to France and the French countryside in her car were unusual for their time and gives an insight into her independant spirit.
St Martin d’Herblay
The parts of the novel I particularly enjoyed were during Edith’s book trails – the time she spends travelling to St Martin d’Herblay to see where Hortense Albert wrote and so she could feel her ghostly presence. She mentions how she can see Albert ‘standing in her yard looking wistfully out toward the river, her hair pulling from its pins in the breeze’.
Montmorency
Edith visits Rousseau’s house to see where he penned ‘The Social Contract’ and looks at the desk where he sat and wrote. She is captivated by it and I felt as if these bookish book trails were an integral part of how Edith worked and how she understood as a writer being able to get close to such literary inspiration.
Of course Paris was the place that Edith was most at home since she had gone there to write and the novel opens as she is at a literary salon in the capital and hoping that the Revue de Paris may serialise it. It is going to be translated and there is discussion as to the merits of translating it, particularly since it is written by a women. I feel the argument of translating fiction is still one that is ongoing even today so I was particular interested to read about this issue back then.
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
Whether you have read any book by Edith Wharton or not will not matter before you start the The Age of Desire. By the end of the novel, you will not only be able to see but you will feel as if you know Edith Wharton intimately and want to read her books.
I myself have read The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth although it was quite a while ago. I now feel as if I have met the woman who wrote them.
The author, Fields, can effortlessly and skillfully draw people and places with her words. I had very clear pictures in my mind of what each of these true life characters looked like and what they wore and the subsequent pictures I found of them more than matched the images in my head. Very clever.
Whatever you may or may not know about Edith Wharton, the truth is that a like any person, she had a life hidden from the page and it is this insight that this book, although one of fiction is based on letters and research painstakingly carried out by the author.
Edith is not really a very likable character in much of the book and she acts like petulant child in much of it especially in her relationships with her lover, Morton Fullerton, and governess Anna who becomes a life long companion, secretary and first reader.
Morton Fullerton is charismatic, compelling, and draws the attention of men and women alike. Edith, a married woman is surprised to find he favours her and she becomes drawn to him in a way that becomes increasingly obsessive. It is with him that she discovers the joy of sexual awakening for the first time.
Edith’s best friend and former governess Anna Bahlmann, is a particularly interesting character since the author has used letters from Edith to Anna to explore their complex relationship. The parts of the novel from Anna’s point of view make for some interesting insights into how a person can care for someone but dislike them and feel powerless to help at the same time. But for me, one sentence cleverly sums up the relationship between the two women. Describing Anna it says:
‘Edith is a language she’s spoken fluently for years.’
Where Next?
