A Backward Glance: An Autobiography

Book Description

A Backward Glance is Edith Wharton's vivid account of both her public and her private life. With richness and delicacy, it describes the sophisticated New York society in which Wharton spent her youth, and chronicles her travels throughout Europe and her literary success as an adult. Beautifully depicted are her friendships with many of the most celebrated artists and writers of her day, including her close friend Henry James.

In his introduction to this edition, Louis Auchincloss calls the writing in A Backward Glance "as firm and crisp and lucid as in the best of her novels." It is a memoir that will charm and fascinate all readers of Wharton's fiction.

Customer Reviews:

Very simply written yet superb autobiograpy..........2003-03-28

This autobiography which really gives a feel for the times in, which Wharton lived as well as for her own life experiences, contains some the most stunningly succinct annecdotes I've ever read. Wharton is truly brilliant at conveying the importance of literature in her life and sharing the possibilities of the literary life with her reader. She reaches through time to inform us of universals and redefine our value systems without being the least bit pedantic. She is a genius. And her autobiography is as entertaining and resonant as a great novel.

You Wouldn't Call Her "Edy".......2001-09-11

Such a lovely child, so patient and well behaved. New York and its society are made magic by her eyes. The opening sections of this memoir are a delight as Mrs. Wharton recounts the sights and feel of New York City in the 1870's. I liked it that she gave us a knee-high view of taking a walk with her beloved father and meeting his friends along the way. (She could never tell what the people's faces looked like, as her view only extended to their knees). Her total recall of her very best bonnet is amazing, and a very pretty bonnet it must have been.

If there is such a person as a "born writer," Edith Wharton is that person. Before she could write, she made stories, and situations "flew around her head like mosquitoes." The world she lived in had no place or interest in a writing lady, so she made her own world, and it was a life-long undertaking.

When Mrs. Wharton received her first acceptance of publication, she was so excited she "ran up and down the staircase in glee." I couldn't have been more surprised if I had read that George Washington played kickball in the back yard. Mrs. Wharton rarely lets you see anything but a very reserved and proper Victorian lady. Yet she did get a divorce (though it is never mentioned.), she lived almost her entire adult life abroad; she compartmentalized her friends like a butterfly collector, and had no interest in being part of the New York society she describes so well. When she was well into her writing career on a family visit to New York, she was invited to a dinner party where she was told a "Bohemian" would be one of the guests. When she got there, she discovered that she herself was the "Bohemian" in question.

The book has a wonderful introduction by that fine author of New York manners, Louis Auchincloss, who is obviously fond of Mrs. Wharton, but not intimidated. Mrs. Wharton has a couple of insightful (and often hilarious) chapters on Henry James that are alone worth the price of the book. But then there are the "friends." I felt I was being buried in endless pages of formal introductions to people I had never heard of, who wrote books that were never read, who gave parties which are long forgotten, and men who were great conversationalists according to Mrs. Wharton, though the witticisms she quoted were so arch and refined, I felt they belonged in bad drawing room comedy.

The book reads well, except for the stretches of introductions. Mrs. Wharton firmly believes that if you can't speak well of someone, you shouldn't speak of him or her at all. Not a bad idea at that

The writing life, uncloseted.......2001-07-24

In this orderly collection of autobiographical sketches Edith Wharton - generously and with nearly photographic recall - begins by inviting readers into her early life in nineteenth-century New York. We are treated to its cast of characters, old New York, country life up the Hudson River, the clothes, the houses, and the remarkable (and unremarkable) personalities - Washington Irving was a friend of the family - as well as the sensibilities of a sociable, bright, and wonderfully observant little girl.

Edith began to read so early that it surprised her upper-class (but unintellectual) family. Before long she became an "omnivorous reader," happiest plowing through the volumes of the classics in her father's library. She soon found that she required time alone - to invent characters, to make up stories. She knew that she had to write fiction - from childhood on, despite realizing by young adulthood that "in the eyes of our provincial society authorship was still regarded as something between a black art and a form of manual labor." Of the social imperative to closet one's writing urges she elaborates: "My father and mother were only one generation away from Sir Walter Scott, who thought it necessary to drape his literary identity in countless clumsy subterfuges, and almost contemporary with the Brontes, who shrank in agony from being suspected of successful novel-writing." The idle rich, Wharton makes clear, were intended to stay idle - and not busy themselves with writing, especially for (horrors!) pay. Her descriptions of her early popular successes are memorable.

In subsequent chapters Wharton lays out her well-thought-out opinions regarding childhood, self-discovery, the formation of the writer's imagination and intellect, and the importance of finding one's own way - as an intellectual and as a social being. There is dry humor, too. She treasured good literature and good conversation - and pursued (and found) them throughout her life. She loved beautiful things and places, too. Finally, she describes her sojourns abroad (mainly England, France, and Italy) and the relationships and places that sustained her and nurtured her creativity, her productivity - and her soul.

Lifelong friends play a central role in much of this memoir. She describes people well, without breaches of privacy or confidences. This is not at all limiting. She writes tenderly of the blossoming of her friendship with "American gentleman" Egerton Winthrop, a man of "cultivated intelligence," a shy, physically awkward man whom Wharton considered "the most perfect of friends." Others were George Cabot Lee, Vernon Lee, Howard Sturgis, Geoffrey Scott, Percy Lubbock, and most of all, Henry James, who is drawn wonderfully (and not uncritically) in this book. Of her friendship with James she remarks "The real marriage of two minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights."

I loved this memoir, and greatly admired Wharton's ability to reveal herself and her world so fully and well.

Age of Innocence...........2000-08-25

Edith Wharton wrote "The Age of Innocence" (I believe it won the Pulitzer), the only fiction she wrote that I have truly liked--and an excellent book. She also wrote much nonfiction, and I have enjoyed her travel writing very much.

In this book, Ms. Wharton reflects on her childhood and adulthood to middle age. (A short biography of her life is included in the introduction by Louis Auchincloss.) She speaks of her parents and growing up in 'Old New York' and living on the Gold Coast of New England with her husband.

Ms. Wharton was a great friend of several men of letters who were prominent during her era, including Henry James. Her writing describes these relationships in part. She may have had an affair with one of them (not James), but unlike writers of today, more is not said than said. Mrs. Wharton divorced her husband in an era when it was not the best thing to do if one wished to remain a member of high society. She seems to have cast off New York society and moved to France to live permantly after her divorce. If you're interested in the story behind the story in "The Age of Innocence" this book is a good resource.

Book Description

Collected here in one volume are six works that represent nearly a quarter century in the productive life of one of the most accomplished and admired of American writers. They explore the private worlds of our "Gilded Age." A once free-spirited American woman in Paris tries to extricate herself from her marriage to a French aristocrat in "Madame de Treymes." A divorced mother finds herself in a strange romantic triangle in "The Mother's Recompense." Repressed passions smolder in small town New England in the classic "Ethan Frome," a tale of unhappy marriage and desperate love which erupts in an act of shattering violence, and in "Summer," which Wharton called the "hot 'Ethan.'" Also included here are "Old New York," four linked novellas set in succeeding decades from the 1840s to the 1870s, Wharton's renowned autobiography "A Backward Glance," and "Life and I," a fascinating autobiographical fragment published here for the first time.

Customer Reviews:

Short novels of society.......2007-03-22

In a way, Edith Wharton was at her best in her novellas -- her stories are lean, taut and emotionally deep. And "Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings" explores views on love, sex, marriage, the conventions of the 19th and early 20th century, and even her own life. They're not just fascinating, but beautifully written.

"Ethan Frome" is the male half of a loveless marriage, with the fretful, fussy Zeena. Then Zeena's lovely cousin Mattie Silver comes to live with them, and she brings out a happier, more passionate side of Ethan. But when Mattie is sent away, Ethan must make a decision. He knows he can't stay in his horrible marriage, so will he run away with Mattie? The choice they make will affect all three lives.

"Summer" shocked the 1917 public, with its frank-for-its-time look at a young woman's sexual awakening. It takes place in the New England village of North Dormer, where the young librarian Charity lives. But when Charity falls in love with an upper-class young rake named Lucius, she finds herself pregnant and unmarried -- a destructive combination in the 1900s. There's only one respectable way out.

"The Mother's Recompense" explores the difficulties of Kate Clephane, who abandoned her husband and daughter, and now lives as an unhappy divorcee on the Riviera. She's unexpectedly invited back, to attend her daughter's wedding -- only to find that her daughter's fiancee is one of Kate's ex-lovers. Now Kate has to wrestle her own regrets and jealousies, to figure out whether to tell her daughter the truth.

"Madame De Treymes" is a sort of Henry Jamesian novella, taking place in early twentieth-century Paris. It follows the unhappy lives abroad of two Americans -- the miserable Fanny Frisbee is married to a nasty aristocrat, and living in Paris. As a knight on a white horse, her friend John is trying to convince her to divorce her hubby and marry him...

"Old New York" is a collection of four novellas, exploring different facets of, well, Old New York -- family strife, adultery, illegitimate children, and a young man's inner changes. And "A Backward Glance" is totally different -- Wharton's autobiography, describing not only her life, but her friendships with the artists of the day, and the inspirations for her rich fiction.

Edith Wharton gave unvarnished looks at social conventions throughout her career -- she doesn't judge, she just tells it how it was, whether she's talking about the Roaring 20s or the uptight Victorian era. Divorce was almost unthinkable, affairs scandalous if revealed, and women had the cards stacked against them in matters of love, marriage and sex.

So her works are even better when you set them in context, full of characters who were totally unlike her. Some were male, some timid and naive, some disgraced (she herself was divorced, though this didn't hurt her socially), and some completely broken by society's dictates. Few of her characters are much like Wharton, but she gets inside their heads and makes them entirely believable.

Wharton's formal, often poetic writing style makes these stories all the richer. They're rich with light, smells, sounds and the swirl of nature, even in a city. But it's offset by the starkness of her stories -- if she took a hard look at hypocrises and social conventions, she didn't flinch from showing what happened to those that transgressed. It's realistic, but a bit depressing.

Doomed love and personal reflection are what makes up a lot of "Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings," a magnificent collection of her shorter books. Sad and beautiful, gripping and classic.

Ethan Frome.......2003-11-07

Ethan Frome is a man that has never been able to make decisions for himself. When he married his wife Zeena it the fact that she made a good companion for the situation with his mother. Their relationship was good at first but it slowly started to die when zeena became sickly. He always did what would be best for other people, but when zeena's cousin came to live with them he took time to see her because Mattie made him feel good about himself. Ethan has been in the same place all of his life and never found a true love. Then mattie came and for once ethan stopped looking at what would be best and started looking for that wonderful feeling.

quick to read but still has a twisted plot.......1999-11-16

I had to read this in under two hours for a literary project and I was very pleased to discover an author who managed to write such a constant yet emotional plot in less than 100 pages. It still hasn't dawned on me whether or not Durham was sensible in his choice. I will be writing a full analysis this week so if ever you need help, email me, and I'd be glad to be of service. Good read for the intellectually stimulating conversationalists.

Average customer rating:

Backward Glance
D. J. Steans
Manufacturer: Behrman House Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0682499641

Average customer rating:

Vivid and enthralling - must read
The Way It Was

Miami: A Backward Glance
Muriel V. Murrell
Manufacturer: Pineapple Press (FL)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Book Description

From the lavish parties, the yachts, and the innovative architecture, to the sultry summer days, the mosquito bites, and the hurricanes, Muriel Murrell captures in a series of charming vignettes Miami's earlier days—from the Roaring Twenties, through the Depression and Deco Days, through the war, and on into the Fifties. Her remembrances are populated with a fascinating mix of eccentric millionaires, artists, shysters, heiresses, and mobsters, some of whose names are recognizable today, and others whose names have disappeared into history along with the gracious winter homes once lining Brickell Avenue.

The backward glance still tells us a little about that time, that place, and those who left their mark. You'll encounter the duPonts, the Deerings, the Vanderbilts, Winston Churchill, David Fairchild, Tennessee Williams, Al Capone. There are the sheikh's luxurious, but unused, estate—and his brother-in-law's unpaid-for palace up the road; a trip to Czarist Russia with the niece of Isadora Duncan; the Nazi submarines sighted off the coast; the crazy schemes of a would-be socialite living off her daughter's inheritance. And there are the simple pleasures: turn back the clock to a trolley ride to the beach for a nickel, watermelon gardens in the summer, wild parrots downtown, schoolgirls catching fiddler crabs along the shore, and an old astrologer who came every winter. And if you weren't there, you'll wish you had been.

Part memoir, part history, Miami, A Backward Glance reminds us how the Magic City rose from the swamp, developing from a pioneer town to a luxury resort to an important crossroads of the entire Western Hemisphere.

Customer Reviews:

Vivid and enthralling - must read.......2004-07-20

Even if you're not from Miami (and I'm not), Miami: A Backward Glance is fascinating. It paints an insider's picture of a place and a lifestyle that are, sadly, now gone. The architecture, the way of life are vividly portrayed -- they come to life and make you long to visit, if only to see the remnants of what once was. Highly recommended.

The Way It Was.......2004-01-22

I really really enjoyed this book. Ms. Murrell delves into the past of the places and people that make Miami so fascinating, uncovering much non-residents (or even current ones) may not know.

She grew up during an interesting time in the city and knows her subject well. She takes you along with all the characters and events from Miami's earliest days to the present, and as they say, "it's all about the journey".

A really great "retro" read!

Customer Reviews:

A Treasure.......2007-05-13

Gifford, James, editor. "Glances Backward: An Anthology of American Homosexual Writing, 1830-1920", Broadview Press, 2007.

A Treasure

Amos Lassen and Literary Pride

What James Gifford gives us in "Glances Backward" is nothing short of a treasure. We are so lucky to have this volume. Of course with the internet we could find all that he gives us but to have it in one book and easy to find makes this literature so much more pleasurable. Much of the literature included in this book is what is known as proto-gay and Gifford has collected about fifty America writers of poetry, prose and non-fiction and excerpted some of their most descriptive works. The introduction to the book instructs the reader as to what to read for and how reading between the lines will make everything so much better understood.
It is not enough that Gifford gives some wonderful selections but he also provides notes of explanation, references and sources for further reading. Not only is this a wonderful place to begin a study of gay literature but t would make a wonderful textbook for those in gay studies.
The literary value of some of the texts is questionable but their historical value is what is really important. There are times that you feel you may need a translator to help you understand some of what is written here but with time, you should not have any trouble.
Culturally Gifford attempts to be inclusive and he includes writings of native-Americans, a lesbian and even an excerpt from an African-American's autobiography. There are also two of the Harvard poets included--George Cabot Lodge and Trumbell Stickney, names unfamiliar to most.
To many of us, our past is as far away as Europe and many of us get to know about t only by reading. This is the beauty of a book like this--it is all here in some form.
The book does not follow strict chronological order. There are some groupings dealing with themes and trends and some selections are grouped as opposites. But what we do have is a broad spectrum of genres and this broadens what we have had up until now and further explains what homosexuality was like at the beginning of the history of this country. The way the book is set up allows for us to enjoy it that much more. One of the ideas I have come up and practice daily is to balance one selection from Gifford with a modern piece that I may happen to be reading. Sometimes looking at the old helps me better to appreciate the new and vice versa.

Backward Glances: Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York

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Academic and Drained of Sex
Excellent

Backward Glances: Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York
Mark Turner
Manufacturer: Reaktion Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

Reference | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

General | Nonfiction | Gay & Lesbian | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society)

ASIN: 1861891806

Book Description

Backward Glances is an exploration of the history of male street cruising. Too often in discussions of urban space and interpretations of urban culture, streetwalking implies a rigid model for the way we inhabit the streets. Beginning with the simple premise that we all walk the streets differently, Mark Turner suggests that male cruising operates through encounter and connection rather than alienation, and that it is the defining experience of what it means to be modern. Backward Glances is the first gay urban history of its kind, examining these issues across a range of cultural material, including novels, poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings, the internet, and fragments of writing about the city such as Whitman's notebooks and David Hockney's graffiti. It provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern Western city. Backward Glances is aimed at all those interested in the culture of the city, queer cultural history and the appropriation of public space.

Customer Reviews:

Academic and Drained of Sex.......2004-12-09

In Backward Glances by Mark W. Turner, queer (a too lengthy discussion of why "queer" and not "gay" erupts in the middle of the book, which is a relief from the even lengthier discussion of a flaneur, by way of Baudelaire) cruising in the streets of New York and London is drained of sex. This is a fairly passionless treatise in general that is short on historical content but waist deep in literary references, although often not to cruising but to an examination of queering urban spaces in a far more general sense. The discussion on Walt Whitman is often inciteful and interesting but veers off topic as Whitman's influence on more recent gay artists is presented. This is a intelligent, academic, often dull piece that never brings the reader a sense of history as actual events take a backstage to literary and artistic representations.

Excellent.......2004-03-21

A truly interesting, intelligent, and readable meditation on gay male culture from the mid 19th century to the present. Jargon-free, wide-ranging in its use of sources, and both sensitive and informed in its use of history. Turner takes on issues of great interest to anyone curious about queer history and theory, and he presents his ideas in a way that is enjoyable and informative. This scholarly and accessible book is almost the direct opposite of the leaden and incoherent prose being marketed by so many these days under the name of "queer theory."

Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances

Average customer rating:

great book

Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances

Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Memoirs | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Creativity & Genius | Psychology & Counseling | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books

Emigration & Immigration | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0822322153

Book Description

A major historical phenomenon of our century, exile has been a focal point for reflections about individual and cultural identity and problems of nationalism, racism, and war. Whether emigrés, exiles, expatriates, refugees, or nomads, these people all experience a distance from their homes and often their native languages. Exile and Creativity brings together the widely varied perspectives of nineteen distinguished European and American scholars and cultural critics to ask: Is exile a falling away from a source of creativity associated with the wholeness of home and one’s own language, or is it a spur to creativity?
In essays that range chronologically from the Renaissance to the 1990s, geographically from the Danube to the Andes, and historically from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, the complexities and tensions of exile and the diversity of its experiences are examined. Recognizing exile as an interior experience as much as a physical displacement, this collection discusses such varied topics as intellectual exile and seventeenth-century French literature; different versions of home and of the novel in the writings of Bakhtin and Lukács; the displacement of James Joyce and Clarice Lispector; a young journalist’s meeting with James Baldwin in the south of France; Jean Renoir’s Hollywood years; and reflections by the descendents of European emigrés. Strikingly, many of the essays are themselves the work of exiles, bearing out once more the power of the personal voice in scholarship.
With the exception of the contribution by Henry Louis Gates Jr., these essays were originally published in a special double issue of Poetics Today in 1996. Exile and Creativity will engage a range of readers from those whose specific interests include the problems of displacement and diaspora and the European Holocaust to those whose broad interests include art, literary and cultural studies, history, film, and the nature of human creativity.

Contributors. Zygmunt Bauman, Janet Bergstrom, Christine Brooke-Rose, Hélène Cixous, Tibor Dessewffy, Marianne Hirsch, Denis Hollier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Linda Nochlin, Leo Spitzer, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Thomas Pavel, Doris Sommer, Nancy Huston, John Neubauer, Ernst van Alphen, Alicia Borinsky, Svetlana Boym, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron

Customer Reviews:

great book.......2002-03-31

a wonderful book, very insightful essays about the complicated nostalgia for lost languages,"identity," citizenship and belonging that the contemporary global diaspora has left us with.

Average customer rating:

A Backward Glance
Eileen Briggs
Manufacturer: The Book Guild Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1857762592

Average customer rating:

A great book about the "greatest generation"

A Backward Glance
Fred Grant
Manufacturer: Xlibris Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Military & Spies | Professionals & Academics | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Family & Childhood | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Memoirs | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

Life & Institutions | Military | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1401032680

Customer Reviews:

A great book about the "greatest generation".......2002-02-17

The author's descriptions of life on a Depression-era farm are funny, heartwarming and, to those of us who never rode a mule or shot a guinea hen for supper, enlightening as well. Tales of the down-home antics of his family and friends had me laughing out loud. His recollections reveal the life-shaping influences of World War II on a typical young American man who, in answer to the call to arms of December 1941, left behind home and family for exotic and often hostile far-off lands. I was engrossed with and charmed by the unfolding story of the author's blossoming wartime romance with a young beauty from the hills of Kentucky. For those who lived through the Depression and war years, the book should be an enjoyable "backward glance." The rest of us can gain a deeper understanding of those most unusual times. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

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