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Any dreamy or bookish girl who once loved “Harriet the Spy” should immediately take up this lively new biography of Edith Wharton by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge. “The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton” tells the story of a strong-willed, unconventional and smart girl who escaped the stifling life of upper­-crust New York around 1880. It includes lush photographs of that faraway time and a pencil drawing Wharton did of herself at 14 reading a book.

When she was 6 her parents set up house in Paris, on the right bank of the Seine. One day they found her sitting under a table in the drawing room with a book. She said she was reading, and when, disbelieving (no one had taught her) they asked her to read aloud, they were shocked to see that she could do so perfectly. The book she had selected from the shelves of the drawing room was a play about a prostitute.

Wharton was given to making up stories from the beginning. She clearly wasn’t a normal girl, and her mother, Lucretia, was alarmed by her odd, unfeminine preoccupations. Lucretia didn’t want to encourage her precocious daughter by giving her paper to write on, so Wharton would take the plain brown paper off parcels that came to the house, spread the giant sheets out on the floor and write on them in long columns. She wrote her first novel this way, at 11. It began: “ ‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?’ said Mrs. Tompkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing room.’ ”

Wharton embarked on her second novel at 14, in secret, and called it “Fast and Loose.” As soon as she completed it she fired off several reviews by fictional critics: “A twaddling romance”; “Every character is a failure, the plot a vacuum, the style spiritless, the dialogue vague, the sentiments weak and the whole thing a fiasco.” This fierce playfulness, the spirited taking on of the universe, infuses both Edith Wharton’s fiction and her life.

The exquisite confusions of her romantic life especially lend themselves to the preoccupations of young readers. Apart from her long, unhappy and unpassionate marriage to Teddy Wharton, most of her relationships with men were charged romantic friendships. Her deep friendships with Walter Berry, Henry James and Bernard Berenson vibrate on the cusp of becoming something more; and in some sense this is the chronic state of adolescence, the friendship that enthralls and obsesses without devolving into run-of-the-mill sexual love. Wharton experiences the joys and frustrations of passionate friendship, the exhausting flirtation, in a way that most people do only when they are very young, and the accounts of these relationships, in a funny way, will make more sense to a 14-year-old than they will to adults (the book glosses over some of the racier details of her one true love affair, with Morton Fullerton).

Wooldridge’s account also conveys the appetite for adventure Wharton showed her whole life. She loved motor cars, and bought one with the proceeds of her first novel. She drove it herself, in a cape and chiffon scarf, and when she finally got a driver, she could hardly bear to let him drive and would lean into the front seat to tell him what to do. During World War I, she devoted herself to running several charities in France, her second home. After her painful and drawn-out divorce, she said she would “eat the world leaf by leaf,” and the author brings to life Wharton’s joy, consuming energy and ability to turn adversity into fuel and hunger.

“The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton” is also, it should be said, an excellent story of rebellion, against the constraints on women, against the shallowness and snobbery of Wharton’s social class, against her chilly mother. Yet for all her brave escaping, her important mutinies against the confines of the day, she was highly successful, feted and beloved within the same social world she condemned. She rose above it, as she sat there in bed scribbling, with her dogs at her feet, and became a star, which is of course the fantasy of alienated and yearning teenagers everywhere. I like to picture girls lying on the beach reading this appealing book and receiving its secret message: stop i-chatting and posting on people’s walls

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (/ˈiːdɪθ ˈhwɔrtən/; born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literaturein 1927, 1928 and 1930.^[1] Wharton combined her insider's view of America's privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era's other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.