This is a glorious biography … The time is ripe for a new biography of Edith Wharton of this intimacy and on this scale … Lee the biographer pursues her subject down every winding corridor, into every hidden passage and dark corner … Her critical exploration of Edith Whartons work is dazzlingly assured … A feat of exhaustive research, and finely tuned to Whartons creative achievement at the same time … [Wharton] could scarcely have failed to be impressed by … its artistic sympathy, its sonorous depths, and its soaring conception.
