TEN years have passed since Mrs. Wharton died, ten tragic years, in which the world she lived in has died too. Mr. Lubbock’s memoir, embroidered with the subtlety of fine tapestry, seems to call her and her reputation from beyond the grave. The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, almost created the era they lived in. Reread today, for all their swift brilliance, their shiny surfaces, their prehensile grasp of an opulent and lecherous society, they have a hollow ring. Gifted with grace and a sinless style, they have neither humanity nor heart. Lily Bart, whose beauty and pliant weakness are so exquisitely portrayed, was not of the stuff which makes tragedy.

Without roots, there is no permanence. With a refined misprision of her country, Mrs. Wharton lived in exile and her characters, despite the intimacy of their New York background, have no spiritual home. Once only, planting her feet firmly on American soil, she called Ethan Frame into existence — and was half ashamed of it! Odd that a lady who banished the Brontës from her library should have created the semblance of eternal passion, eternal pain!

All this, though his verdict differs, Mr. Lubbock understands. His memoir, the more exacting that his affection had been long and fond, is written with beautifully involved precision. They lived, Mrs. Wharton and her tight little ring of aesthetic and accomplished bachelors, in a universe of which Henry James was God the Father. All the play of mind on mind, the inwrapping of speech and thought, the complete knowledge of the world and its motives, which James personifies, is plaited into Mr. Lubbock’s Jamesian pattern. Comprehending the diamond facets of Mrs. Wharton’s intelligence, he has woven into his narrative intimate recollections by her close friends. All or nearly all the truth is there.

Mrs. Wharton was a man’s woman. Her intimacies were almost entirely with men, and concerning the one man whose shadow fell permanently across her life, Mr. Lubbock’s troubled reticence is pierced by an amazing frankness.

ELLERY SEDGWICK