Film buffs are familiar with the term "biopic" --- a film that straddles the line between biography and fiction in order to speculate about the undocumented private life of a public figure. Fields does the literary equivalent here, using letters and other historic records to reimagine the life of the American novelist Edith Wharton during the three years (1907-1910) when she was engaged in a passionate love affair with a much younger man in Paris.
Wharton was unhappily married to a husband who apparently suffered from bipolar disorder. Moreover, Fields suggests, Teddy Wharton was so sexually inept that Edith repulsed every attempt at intimacy. She is portrayed as a woman who valued intellect over feeling, driven to control and perfect every aspect of her life by a mother who was cold and abusive. Her strongest emotional attachment was to the woman who had been her governess, and became her secretary and lifelong confidante, Anna Bahlmann.
Morton Fullerton was the charming and erratic protege of Wharton's friend and mentor, Henry James, an American journalist working in Paris. Their tumultuous relationship, Fields suggests, introduced Wharton to erotic passion and emotional release --- also to obsession, jealousy and dispair --- but ultimately gave her the courage to defy convention, divorce her husband and live life on her own terms. The liaison with Fullerton, and Wharton's abandonment of her husband, strains her friendship with Anna almost to the breaking point before the novel reaches its resolution.
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| Anna Bahlmann |
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| William Morton Fullerton |
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| Edith Wharton |
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