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Start giftingA Feast of Words
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Learn moreThe mystery of how a wealthy New York socialite became a major American novelist is brilliantly explored in this definitive psychological interpretation of Edith Wharton’s life and work. This edition includes two new chapters illuminating Wharton’s times and creative process: one on Lily Bart and the lethal stereotypes of women on the nineteenth-century stage, and another on the way Wharton’s own sensual awakening led from the frozen austerity of Ethan Frome to the lyricism and tempered happiness of Summer. Everyone who admires Wharton’s novels will want to experience this superb biography.
Cynthia Griffin Wolff received her PhD in English at Harvard University in 1965 and taught literature for many years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The author of the highly acclaimed biographies Emily Dickinson and Samuel Richardson and the Eighteenth-Century Puritan Character, she holds the 1922 Professorship of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an honorary board member of the Mount, the Edith Wharton Restoration Foundation in Lenox, Masachusetts.
Anna Fields (1965–2006), winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award in 2004, was one of the most respected narrators in the industry. Trained at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, she was also a director, producer, and technician at her own studio, Cedar House Audio.
Reviews
“Every eminent scholar relies upon A Feast of Words as the definitive psychological interpretation of Edith Wharton’s life and work. Its importance has been phenomenal.”
“Fields’ powerful reading is richly seductive and melodic, but careful as well: she deftly shifts intonation slightly between Wharton and Wolff so that the reader never confuses the two. In the end, she reads a satisfying and scholarly portrait of the woman as artist.”
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