En français: "Les Beaux Mariages", traduction de Suzanne Mayoux.
- Laffont, 1964.
- Coll. 10/18, 1983.
France-Culture : La rebelle de New York Dimanche 22 Juillet 2001
de 17h00 à 18h35 dans UNE VIE, UNE OEUVRE
(Télérama n°2688-18/07/01, p.128).
Avec Diane de Margerie, écrivain et biographe
de Wharton; Jean Pavans, écrivain et traducteur d'Edith Wharton
et d'Henry James ; Elizabeth Lennard, cinéaste et photographe, qui a réalisé
un documentaire sur Wharton ; Judith Boullet, productrice de télévision
et représentante de la fondation Edith Wharton à Lennox (Massachussets)
; Darina O'Kelly, professeur de linguistique à l'université de Toulon
et présidente de l'association Edith Wharton à Hyères.
Présentée par Diane Kolnikoff, cette émission, tout en abordant
les grands thèmes plus connus, mettait l'accent sur des aspects de la vie
et de l'ouvre de Wharton moins connus...
Quien aurait fait l'enregistrement?
mer-sea!
Edith Wharton est la grande romancière américaine qui portraitisait
la haute société new yorkaise. En fait, c'est la plus européenne
des écrivains américains, plus que Henry James, son ami, à qui
on la compare souvent. Elle est née à New York, en 1862, dans une famille
aisée qui part très tôt vivre en Europe.
Cette expérience a formé son sens de l'esthétique, puis
ses goûts littéraires : Tolstoï, Balzac, Trollope, Flaubert et
Stendhal figurent parmi ses auteurs préférés. Après un
mariage quasi arrangé avec un homme de son milieu, Teddy Wharton, aimant les
chevaux et la chasse, mais sans culture, Edith Wharton n'aspire qu'à retrouver
l'Europe et adopte la France comme résidence de 1906 à sa mort en 1937.
Edith Wharton publie, relativement tard et timidement, une oeuvre de plus de 40 titres.
Ce que l'on connait moins d'elle, c'est l'étendue de ses connaissances
et intérêts. Elle écrit des romans, des nouvelles, de la poésie,
des livres sur l'architecture, la décoration, les voyages, la culture française,
des articles sur la guerre de 14-18, et des critiques littéraires.
Femme complexe et solitaire, perçue comme «une grande mondaine»,
Edith Wharton a survécu à des difficultés familiales, au manque
d'amour dès son plus jeune âge, à des périodes de dépression,
au refus de son milieu de reconnaître sa vocation littéraire.
Diane de Margerie termine ainsi sa biographie:
«Edith Wharton a toujours eu la nostalgie de la symbiose et de l'unité,
mais il lui fut impossible de les atteindre, sans doute parce que les blessures de
l'enfance avaient refusé de se cicatriser, mais aussi parce qu'elle était
persuadée de la solitude essentielle de chacun.
Seule l'écriture pouvait rassembler ses forces et ses faiblesses, réconcilier
son désir d'absolu avec son penchant pour la dérision. »
AGREGANT WRITINGS
> comme je n'ai pas franchement aimé "Custom" , j'ai
essayé de lire autre chose de Wharton. Et j'ai trouvé mon bonheur avec
"Ethan Frome".
J'ai cru un moment que E. Wharton etait une frivole qui écrivait sur la frivolité,
quelle erreur! "Ethan Frome" est une histoire magnifique, en pleine campagne
!
C'est assez court, je vous le recommande, d'autant plus qu'il y a une introduction
très intéressante par Edith W'herself, sur les procédés
utilisés. -MC.
Article sur Wharton dans Le Monde
du 6 juillet 2001 - des rapprochements avec Henry James et Walt Whitman.
Site with bibliography, lists of articles...
Discussing the works
of Edith Wharton : A FORUM
The organisation of time in "Custom..." follows the classic chronological
pattern with free use of ellipsis & flashbacks but no direct prolepsis although
there are foreboding elements or predictions by the characters.
There are passing allusions to S. Brenhardt's American tours & a reference to
a copy of Hound of the Baskervilles 1st published in 1902.
So it is tempting to see the opening of the novel in 1903 & little Paul's age
is used as a precise indication:
1) Paul is 2 years chapter 14 when Undine forgets about his birthday party.
2) He's 6 chapter 31 when Moffatt helps Undine carry him to a cab.
3) He is nearly 9 in the last chapter so the end of the story occurs in 1913.
However, Wharton herself viewed her story between 1899 & 1906-7 as attested by
a handwritten note.
About Edith Wharton
BIOGRAPHIE extraits: One of the
major figures in American literary history, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) presented intriguing
insights into the American experience...
EDITH WHARTON, 1862-1937
Born Edith Newbold Jones on January 24, 1862, in
New York City, Edith Wharton was from birth a part of the wealthy New
York society she depicted so vividly in her
fiction.
Through her father, George Frederic Jones, and mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander
Jones, she could claim descent from three families whose names were synonymous with
wealth and position: the Stevenses, Rhinelanders, and Schermerhorns.
Educated at home with tutors, exposed
at an early age to the classics in her father's
library, Edith Wharton showed early
literary precocity.
Although it cannot be said that her parents encouraged her writing, Lucretia Jones
recognized her daughter's talent and in 1878 had a slim volume of her adolescent
poems (titled simply Verses) privately printed and distributed to family and friends.
By this time, however, Edith had already completed an unpublished novel of some 30,000
words that she called Fast and Loose.
After the youthful trials, Edith for the most part put aside her serious literary
endeavors to play the role of a young society lady.
Having suffered through a broken engagement with eligible young Harry Stevens when
she was nineteen, Edith in 1885 married Edward R. "Teddy" Wharton, a member
of a prominent Boston family and thirteen years her senior.
The couple settled first in New York City, then purchased a home, "Land's End,"
in fashionable Newport.
In 1902 they moved into "The Mount," their impressively large mansion in
Lenox, Massachusetts, with Edith herself contributing to the design and interior
decoration.
She had already displayed her talent in this field in collaborating in 1897 with
the architect Ogden Codman on
The Decoration of Houses (New York : Scribner's,
1897).
her first full-length published work. Edith and Teddy's marriage, however,
was never on a very solid footing.
From the first they experienced intellectual and sexual incompatibility, with Teddy's
later neurological disorders adding to their estrangement.
After living apart for many years, they divorced in 1913 when Edith was fifty-one.
They had no children.
Although she never relinquished her American citizenship and made occasional visits
to the United States, Edith Wharton lived permanently in France, from 1907 until
her death, first in the fashionable Rue de Varenne in Paris and, after World War
I, at her two homes: the chateau Ste. Claire at Hyeres and the Pavillon Colombe near
Paris.
Here she graciously entertained many of the noted literati of Europe and took great
delight in her gardens, which became famous throughout France.
Among her closest acquaintances who experienced her friendship and hospitality were
Walter Berry, Gaillard Lapsley, Percy Lubbock, Robert Norton, Bernard Berenson, Paul
Bourget, and, most prominently, Henry
James, with whom she discussed her writing and from whom she received much advice.
Still in Paris when World War I erupted, Edith Wharton spent most of the war years
organizing various charities for war relief, the most prominent being her two organizations
for war refugees, the Children of Flanders and the American Hostel for Refugees.
For her unflagging aid to war-torn France and French and Belgian refugees, she was
awarded numerous decorations by the French and Belgian governments, the most noted
being the French Legion of Honor.
After the war she continued for many years her aid to tubercular patients in France.
In 1923 Edith Wharton was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Yale University
for both her contributions to literature and her humanitarian endeavors.
From the publication of her first short story in 1889, Edith Wharton devoted her
life to her writing.
During her lifetime she published 22 novels, 11 collections of short stories, 2 volumes
of poetry, 4 books of travel or cultural interpretations, an autobiography, 3 other
works of non-fiction, several translations, and numerous uncollected poems, stories,
or articles.
Although Edith Wharton's novels and stories reveal many themes and settings, those
novels which unflinchingly depict New York aristocratic life have won her enduring
fame.
Among her most critically acclaimed titles are
- The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911),
- The Custom of the Country (1913), and
- The Age of Innocence (1920), which won for her
the Pulitzer Prize.
She is best known as a novelist, but several of
her many short stories have been judged among the best American stories of the twentieth
century.
Although most of her collections contain stories of note, two that are often singled
out as exemplary are early collections:
- The Greater Inclination (her first published collection,
1899) and
- The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904).
A complex woman of her day, Edith Wharton was long
before her death generally regarded as one of the foremost American authors of the
20th century, her work admired and acclaimed by many of the leading writers and critics
of her time.
The many biographies and critical studies devoted to her life and work give testimony
to her enduring reputation, and her surviving correspondence with many leading men
and women of letters, as well as her family and friends, gives clear indication of
her varied interests and concerns and often includes perceptive comments on her unique
world.
Edith Wharton died at her home in Hyères, France on August 11, 1937, at age
seventy-five.
Merci à :
Friends of Edith Wharton qui publie
A biography, her papers
"Jêai toujours considéré
le monde visible comme une scène de tableaux, plus ou moins harmonieusement
composée, et le désir de rendre le tableau plus joli était,
autant que je puisse le définir, la forme que prenait mon instinct féminin
de plaire." EW.
Cette sensibilité visuelle, cette recherche de lêharmonie À et la fuite de
son contraire, "le désir de rendre le tableau plus joli" À
se retrouvent, au-delà de "lêinstinct féminin", comme les
principes directeurs de la vie et de lê“uvre dêEdith Wharton.
* A propos de l'auteur
* Repères biographiques
* L'amitié amoureuse
* L'ambiguïté de
l'innocence
* Le jardin secret
sur le site de France 3 : Un siècle d'écrivains:
E. Wharton
Wharton
: biographie
"...as an author's introduction
to his work, I can imagine nothing of any value to his readers except a statement
as to why he decided to attempt the work in question, and why he selected one form
rather than another for its embodiment. These primary aims,the only ones that can
be explicitly stated, must be by the artist, be almost instinctively felt and acted
upon before there can pass into his creation that imponderable something more which
causes life to circulate in it, and preserves it a little from decay ." E. Wharton,
intro à "Ethan Frome" (1911).
Quelques articles sur E.
Wharton.
Edith
Wharton: An overview with biocritical sources
Edith Wharton filmography
A review of The custom: For money, not love...
The Custom in the Country
Some quotes from Wharton's short story "Expiation"
about a woman writer, that sounds quite autobiographical À
- "I'm so afraid of being misunderstood,...
of being, as it were, in advance of my time ... like poor Flaubert."
- "A writer who dares to show up the hollowness
of social conventions must have the courage of her convictions and be willing to
accept the consequences of defying society."
- "It has always seemed to me that the message
I had to deliver was not for myself alone, but for all the other women in the world
who have felt the hollowness of our social shams, the ignominy of bowing down to
the idols of the market, but have lacked either the courage or the power to proclaim
their independence "
Bibliographie de la Professeure Nelly Valtat-Comet,
univ. Savoie.
> Sur le site des
Editions
du Temps des articles à télécharger sur The Custom of,
nous signale Marie de Monaco.
> There are a couple of articles on Wharton on the "Atlantic Monthly"
site. They're not precisely on "Custom of the country" but they have some
interesting elements that can be useful.
"The Atlantic Monthly" is precisely the magazine in which Wharton published
some of her short stories in her lifetime.
Go to
theatlantic.com2001/07/
and
theatlantic.com/06aug/
Edith Wharton lectures plurielles
: texte complet, à télécharger,
les Conf. de Nanterre 2001 par un collectif coordonné par Marie-Claude
Perrin-Chenour. Ed. du Temps.
|
