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The title of Gloria C. Erlich's new critical study may seem strange to readers of Edith Wharton, whose novels seldom portray sexual education or erotic awakening. If anything, Wharton's life
and art are associated with sexual miseducation: her cheerless 28-year marriage was essentially devoid of either sex or love, her one passionate relationship ended disastrously, and her fictional characters, among the most repressed in literature, are inevitably punished (or, more typically, punish themselves) for acting upon instinctual urges. One can readily imagine a book on the sexual education of D. H. Lawrence but not on Edith Wharton, who, like her close friend and mentor, Henry James, dramatizes passion as disruptive and problematic, incapable of being tamed or sublimated. Novels like The House of Mirth , Ethan Frome , and her masterpiece, The Age of Innocence , for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, contain characters who fail to undergo a sexual education.
Nevertheless, Erlich's title is perfectly appropriate, for it refers to Wharton's lifelong efforts to come to terms with the role of sexuality and love in human experience. By tracing Wharton's erotic development, as expressed in her letters, memoirs, fiction, and poetry, and by exploring the continuities between her life and art, Erlich heightens our understanding both of a major American novelist and the psychology of love.
Born in 1862 into a socially prominent New York family, Edith enjoyed what appeared to be a privileged childhood. Her father, George Frederic Jones, was a handsome, affable, well-educated man who was the model for the prototypical New York gentleman of Wharton's stories. Wealthy enough so that he did not have to work, he lived a life of leisure and cultivated an interest in literature. He gave his daughter the freedom of his library, where she read omnivorously and educated herself. Edith's mother, Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, was beautiful, fashionable, ambitious; according to rumo