Read by Meredith Mitchell
14 hrs, 2 mins.
Published January 2012 by Pamela Dorman Bks
Publisher's Summary:
They say that behind every great man is a woman. Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann-her governess turned literary secretary, and her mothering, nuturing friend. When at the age of forty-five Edith falls passionately in love with a dashing, younger journalist, Morton Fullerton, and is at last opened to the world of the sensual, it threatens everything certain in her life-but especially her abiding friendship with Anna. As Edith's marriage crumbles, the women must face the fragility at the heart of all friendships.
The Age of Desire takes us on a vivid journey through Wharton's early Gilded Age world: Paris with its glamorous literary salons and dark secret cafes, the Wharton's elegant house in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Henry James' manse in Rye, England. Edith's real letters and intimate diary entries are woven throughout the book. The Age of Desire brings to life one of literatures most beloved writers, whose own story was as complex and nuanced as that of any of the heroines she created.
My Thoughts:
This one has been on my TBR list for at least a decade. I'm not sure that I ever got any further than the name Edith Wharton in the publisher's summary before I added this one to the list. As a huge fan of Wharton, I felt certain I'd enjoy anything that taught me more about the woman behind the books I loved, even if it was fiction.
I feel that listening to this one might have really had a negative impact on my impression of the book. Mitchell does a perfectly acceptable job of reading all of the book except in her voicing of Morton Fullerton; Fullerton was, we learn early on, originally from Boston and Mitchell struggles trying to voice not just a man but a man from Boston. Every time his character "spoke" I was so focused on the reading that it overtook the actually words he was saying.
But that wasn't my only issue with this book. Was it a book about Wharton's affair with Fullerton and the end of her marriage? Was it a book about the relationship between Wharton and Bahlmann? Of course the answer to both of those is "yes." For me, though, I would have preferred a book that chose one over main story line over the other. In the end, Anna is with Edith from the beginning of the book to the end. So it's their story. But a great deal of the book focuses on the interactions between Wharton and Fullerton, and a fair amount of the time is spent working up to them consummating their relationship and then their various times together. Kirkus Reviews calls those passages "excellent erotic writing." I must admit to having sped up the book to get through those parts of the book; they felt a bit out of place to me. But I imagine that Fields felt like she needed to include them to make readers understand why Wharton was so enthralled by a man who most people warned her away from, a man who frequently ghosted her, a man who was clearly not as attached to Edith as she was to him, a man who obviously scams people.
One last quibble - in my opinion, the book would have benefited from culling 50 or so pages. Some "scenes" could have been omitted entirely without losing the point of the book. I understand that Fields drew heavily from Wharton's diaries and letters and it may be that she wanted to hew to those documents as she made her way through the story she wanted to tell. Perhaps less of the back and forth between Edith and Morton; perhaps less detail about Teddy's manic or depressive episodes.
All of that and I still believe that had I read this book in print, I would have enjoyed it more. I certainly learned more about Wharton's character - some that made me feel for her and some things that made me think that she was frequently a person that she might have skewered in one of her books.
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