The ambassadress; A stunning new biography reveals the passionate side of Edith Wharton, who found freedom in the expat life.(Book review)

Few figures are as luminous in American letters as Edith Wharton. One of the twen_tieth century's most important novelists-the author of more than 40 books, she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction-she is synonymous with New York's gilded age of brownstones, rustling silks, and covert social maneuverings. Recently, with the restoration of her Berkshires estate, she's also been rehabilitated as an arbiter of interior style. But due in part to her habit of destroying her more intimate correspondence, she's remained a remote figure, akin to the kind of corseted parlor-dweller found in the Sargent paintings that adorn her book jackets. It's a state of affairs remedied at long last by Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton (Knopf), a rich, 900-page portrait of a woman who lived as ardently-and modernly-as she wrote. Born in 1862 into an elite society that had as little regard for literary pursuits as it did for educating women, Edith Newbold Jones was the daughter of a kindly but ineffectual father, George Frederic, and an exquisitely dressed, scrupulously conventional mother, the former Lucretia Rhinelander. The phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses" supposedly has its origins with her father's family, and it seems that pace-setting had its consequences, as financial difficulties led Edith, with her parents, to spend several formative years in Europe. The young Edith spent much of her youth taking refuge in her father's library, but it was on a husband-_hunting trip to Bar Harbor that "Pussy" Jones met two of the men who would figure prominently in her life: Walter Berry, a lifelong confidant, and Edward Wharton, the school chum of her brother's whom she married in 1885. Both the marriage and the role of society matron were exercises in stifling incompatibility. A bon vivant, Teddy Wharton had little in common with his intellectual bride apart from an affection for small dogs. The young couple distracted themselves with renovation projects and trips abroad, and it wasn't until Edith was 35 that she published her first book, The Decoration of Houses, written with architect Ogden Codman, Jr. Greatly informed by her travels in France and Italy, this marvelously officious guide to good taste is an excoriating critique of the heavily draped, bibelot-laden Victorian decor that was the mainstay of the American upper-class home. Reprinted this month in a lush volume by Rizzoli, it promotes classical ideals of symmetry and utility, and is as much an indictment of her parents' lifestyle as her novels would later be. By the time Wharton had moved into the Mount, the grand Lenox villa in which she put these design theories into practice, she was intent on a writing career. As the target of her freshly sharpened pen, the Lenox upper crust rarely came calling. When one local dowager, proudly conducting a tour of her own home, remarked, "And this I call my Louis Quinze room," Edith replied, "staring about through her lorgnette, 'Why, my dear?'_" Her early fiction is filtered through a precise aesthetic gaze, from the doomed Lily Bart's hothouse-flower wardrobe in The House of Mirth, the 1905 publication of which made Wharton a best-_selling author and a household name, to a story comparing a woman's life to "a great house full of rooms," beginning with those accessible for formal visits, then those for family, and finally, "in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a ...