
Edith Wharton
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Narrated by:
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Kate Reading
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By:
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Hermione Lee
About this listen
Born in 1862, Wharton escaped the suffocating fate of the well-born female, traveled adventurously in Europe and eventually settled in France. After tentative beginnings, she developed a forceful literary professionalism and thrived in a luminous society. Her life was fed by nonliterary enthusiasms as well: her fabled houses and gardens and the culture of the Old World, which she never tired of absorbing. Yet intimacy eluded her.
With profound empathy and insight, Lee brilliantly interweaves Wharton's life with the evolution of her writing, the full scope of which shows her to be far more daring than her stereotype as lapidarian chronicler of the Gilded Age. In its revelation of both the woman and the writer, Edith Wharton is a landmark biography.
Listen to the classics: explore our list of Edith Wharton titles.©2007 Hermione Lee (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Edith Wharton stands among the finest writers of early 20th-century America. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton’s scathing social commentary is on full display through the beautiful and manipulative Undine Spragg. When Undine convinces her nouveau riche parents to move to New York, she quickly injects herself into high society. But even a well-to-do husband isn’t enough for Undine, whose overwhelming lust for wealth proves to be her undoing.
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Cannot recommend a better narrator!
- By Esther on 07-29-12
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A creative life well lived
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great biography
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Ethan Frome (AmazonClassics Edition)
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COVID cabin fever entertainment
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Extraordinary
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Edith Wharton stands among the finest writers of early 20th-century America. In The Custom of the Country, Wharton’s scathing social commentary is on full display through the beautiful and manipulative Undine Spragg. When Undine convinces her nouveau riche parents to move to New York, she quickly injects herself into high society. But even a well-to-do husband isn’t enough for Undine, whose overwhelming lust for wealth proves to be her undoing.
-
-
Cannot recommend a better narrator!
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By: Edith Wharton
-
Chasing Bright Medusas
- A Life of Willa Cather
- By: Benjamin Taylor
- Narrated by: Benjamin Taylor
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality.
-
-
A creative life well lived
- By DanFred on 07-09-24
By: Benjamin Taylor
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Tom Stoppard
- A Life
- By: Hermione Lee
- Narrated by: Stephen Crossley
- Length: 37 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism, and fiction. His most acclaimed creations - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Shakespeare in Love - remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences.
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-
great biography
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-
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- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 3 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the dead gray cold of Starkfield, Massachusetts, farmer Ethan Frome is struggling to scrape out a living. His duties are to his wife, Zeena - an ungrateful, soul-sick hypochondriac as frigid as the New England winter. When Zeena’s cousin Mattie arrives to help with the farm, the ethereal, gentle-natured beauty brings a light and a fugitive affection into Ethan’s life. Yet for Ethan and Mattie, daring to be happy - and together - will have its consequences.
-
-
COVID cabin fever entertainment
- By Naomi Levine on 12-29-20
By: Edith Wharton
-
Red Comet
- The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
- By: Heather Clark
- Narrated by: Laura Jennings
- Length: 45 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world.
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Amazing!
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Towards the end of the 19th century and for the first few years of the 20th, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege, and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, 50 years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world - the New World, to be precise. From 1874 - the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known "Dollar Princess", married Randolph Churchill - to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage....
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On the last night of 1937, 25-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society - where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.
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Critic reviews
“Lively . . . Insightful . . . Thorough and intelligent . . .This meticulous, generous biography is likely to suffice for a long time . . . One can at last grasp the full range of Wharton’s writing and the full power of her energy.” (Diane Johnson, Washington Post Book World)
“A splendid biography, extremely rich in social and historical detail, a telling picture of the many years Wharton’s life spanned . . . Biography is usually the revenge of little people on big people . . .but Lee is subtle and big-hearted enough to understand her subject . . . Lee never reduces Wharton’s books to veiled autobiography, just as she is never reluctant to interpret them in the light of Wharton’s life . . . A sophisticated, finely written portrait . . . Edith Wharton would have been horrified by the ‘indiscretions’ in this biography, but it is the balanced, richly detailed, and researched portrait she deserves.” (Edmund White, The New York Review of Books)
“A rich tapestry. There is so much here . . . Edith Wharton shimmers with details about a vanished world, and Lee . . . brings it to vivid life.” (Jacqueline Blais, USA Today)
What listeners say about Edith Wharton
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-27-24
Well researched, narrator has good voice. Only...
Don't buy from Audible if you can avoid it. Books that are in public domain, that non profit librovox has volunteers record and then makes available for FREE to public, Jeff Bezos has on audible for SALE. profiteering off others voluntary efforts. Bezos doesn't know what the word volunteer means. IF he cared, he could employ adequate staff to monitor that this doesn't happen. No ethics. Check before you buy any public domain books from audible or Amazon, including Wharton, H James, other classics. I wish this book wasn't abridged, but unabridged doesn't seem to be available.
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- Kimball Smith
- 12-06-18
Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton
Brilliant! So enjoyable. I'll read the book now in its entirety. What a real pleasure.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-23-23
Fascinating Life
I really enjoyed this biography, even though I have next to nothing in common with Wharton. You have to admire Wharton's love of gardens, her high standards, her organizational skills, insatiable reading of books, her devotion to France during the war. At the same time, the author does not shy away from her subject's anti-semitism and racism - which I think a lot of other biographers deliberately stay clear of. I really appreciated how the author deals with Wharton's inability to appreciate the next generation of writers. It will spur me to read more of Wharton's books, and watch the movie adaptations.
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1 person found this helpful
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- An Amazonian
- 06-30-22
Abridgement is rough
This is a heavily abridged version of Lee's 800-page biography. Sometimes the abridgement is rough--once I got confused about where we were.
The reader does a very nice job; her French accent is very good (Wharton was fluent in French and lived in Paris for the last decades of her life, so there are many French passages in her letters.)
Lee is a brilliant biographer, famous for her work on Virginia Woolf. This biography got more mixed reviews, though I'm not sure why. I haven't read Lee's Woolf biography, but I've read her very first book which walks through all of Woolf's novels in order, and it is splendid. (That book is harder to find now; it's from back in the 70s.)
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2 people found this helpful
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- C. Lyon
- 07-29-16
I thought I knew Edith Wharton before . . .
wonderfully indepth and well-rounded perspective of a woman we tend to think of as single faceted. Her life was much more than I had ever imagined it to be. I will go back and read her works with.a much deeper appreciation of the real woman behind the words.
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Overall
- Aaron Elliott
- 04-26-07
Gardens Over Great Novels
Edith Wharton admirers will enjoy this biography. My only regret is history of her greatest novels were overshadowed by gardening plans, relationships with architects/designers and her war work. These are all part of her make-up but not what make her a dynamic and vital writer of the human condition as it thwarts itself against class and station. I was looking forward to a feast and was moderately happy with a tasty sandwich.
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17 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Chris
- 07-20-09
Abridged version favors life over works
As an abridgment this isn't bad, but other reviewers have complained that this version focuses on gardens instead of Wharton's works. That's true, but it seems to have been a conscious decision to give a more rounded picture of Wharton than another retelling of Ethan Frome might have done. Lee's biography is huge (800+ pages) but well worth reading in full fpr those whose interest is piqued by this version.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Interested Party
- 08-06-22
Pronunciation
Incredibly, the reader - starting in Chapter 2 - mispronounces the word “library” - two times in the same sentence. And in at least one other occasion. She says “libary.” Incredibly annoying!
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- Michael Cochran
- 02-19-21
Reads like a text book.
One of the driest narratives, both in text and the reading, I've ever listened to. No passion or sympathetic prose .
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Overall
- Cariola
- 10-25-07
Who Knew . . . ?
that Wharton's life would make such a snoozer? Sure, I knew she had roots in New York society; but I had no idea she was a Francophiliac snob, a racist, and an antisemite. I've enjoyed her novels over the years, and I had looked forward to learning more about her from this book. Unfortunately, what I learned made me dislike her. The book is unevenly paced, flying across Wharton's family history, childhood, and early married years, then spending what seemed like ages on her gardening and French pretentions. Most irritating were the extended passages from the journals she kept while in France--read in French, without translations. My advice is to read the Wharton classics and skip the bio.
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10 people found this helpful