Offers a new approach to the life and work of Edith Wharton (1862-1937), drawing on the recent discovery of 8000 of her letters and examining the intricate network of relations between her life and art, her public reputation and private life. Previous biographies have cast Wharton as a contradictory character, but here the author strives to engage her - one of America's most prolific writers in her time - both as a woman and a writer, examining the place of a woman and the meaning of femininity and female sexuality in late-19th and early 20th-century America and France. Particular attention is payed to Wharton's childhood and young adulthood in New York and Newport, her breaking away from America and the years of her residency in France, most importantly in Paris, where she successfully entered the closed society of French nobility.