A Backward Glance

For purposes of this review of Edith Wharton's autobiography, A Backward Glance, I'll divide the book into three parts - naturally enough, beginning, middle and end.

This is an arbitrary division on my part, with the beginning and end taking up approximately 20% each, and with the middle taking up the remaining 60%.

In the beginning of the autobiography, Wharton writes on her early life and family background. She was born in New York city to a well to do, established family. She spent a good deal of her early childhood in Europe - mainly Paris and Rome - of which she writes fondly.

I enjoyed this first part, but I found the middle boring. In this middle section, she writes mostly of the people she knew and associated with at fashionable dinners. Although many of the people she writes of in the book may have been well known at the time, now most are forgotten. The two most famous dropped names are Teddy Roosevelt and writer Henry James. Too much of the book, I think, is spent on Henry James.

Unfortunately, although she does occasionally mention some of her work, she does not spend much time explaining her writing process. I would have much rather read how she came to write her novels than read about her dinners with celebrities of her day.

I did enjoy reading the final portion of her autobiography where she writes a good deal about her experiences before and during the First World War. She goes into her war experiences in greater detail in a collection of magazine articles for Scribner's Magazine in 1915, Fighting France; from Dunkerque to Belfort.

I wouldn't recommend this autobiography to the general public who are not familiar with Wharton. I don't believe reading this will bring the casual reader to her novels. There may be some Wharton fans who would find this autobiography entertaining, but as a Wharton fan, I was disappointed.

As a side note, early in the autobiography, Wharton mentions Mayne Reid . I've basically read two novelists this year - Edith Wharton and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - both of whom mention the adventure writer in a novel. I've read only one of Reids' books -The Quadroon- Seeing his name mentioned in A Backward Glance, I downloaded another of his novels from Project Gutenberg [The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas] which I've put in the queue for reading later this month.