“Never have I felt as much as I do today just how much I love France and my French friends,” Edith Wharton wrote in a 1914 letter to an acquaintance. The author was a renowned Francophile, living permanently in the country for the last three decades of her life. She lived on rue de Varenne in Paris, later dividing her time between two country houses: one in Hyères on the Mediterranean coast and the other in Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt near the capital, where she died in 1937.
In Edith Wharton in France, the late Claudine Lesage offers a French perspective on the author’s love for her adopted country. This is the life’s work of a critic who dedicated her academic career to the author and who has played a crucial part in introducing Wharton to France: in her translations of “Xingu” (2019) and The Cruise of the Vanadis (2018), Wharton’s diary...
