Edith and This Old House

The first day of the new year. We closed it with playing music at my house, great company, great piano and guitar and mandolin- not so great banjo. (That's me, everyone else made me sound so good.) Got to talk and eat and watch the ball drop on TV. This morning I just finished "Edith Wharton, An Extraordinary Life" by Eleanor Dwight. Big pictorial biography that I picked up for a $1.50 

A entertaining read. She was basically old money, married money and made money from her books. Moved around a lot, had a lot of money to spend on clothes, houses and gardens and traveling and entertaining. I've not read any of her novels yet, so I'll let you know. I grew a little tired of the interior designs of her houses and her expansive gardening. I have a feeling that this, like James, is a bit of the 19th century version of "Lifestyles of The Rich & Famous" Its hard to feel sympathetic towards her loveless marriage and her one or two flings. I did discover that she was neighbors for a little while with the Gilders (near Lennox) and that it was much more of a enclave for the wealthy that I realized. I'm having second thoughts about my Helena De Kay Gilder (see website link above- retirement project) thing. I had gotten out my transcript of the journal she and her husband kept in first few years of their marriage and worked a bit one afternoon trying to read and write out another couple of pages, but the handwriting is just too unreadable. Supposedly, Helena's daughter was transcribing it, I wonder if its time to give up or time to get my hands on the family papers to see what's there.

My fiction doesn't deal with the rich, why am I interested in writing a biography about one?

Anyhow, just because they are great writers, that doesn't mean they had meaningful lives or even interesting ones. I tried one of Goethe's travel journals and discovered it was all about rock collecting. Time for a nother nap. Happy 2010!