When the great American novelist and writer Edith Wharton wrote her memoir a backward glance in

in 1934 just a few years before she died, her goal was to tell the story of her life, in her words and on her terms.

Given her extraordinary international fame, in part as a chronicler of the Gilded Age, she knew her life would be

written about and studied well after her passing. And as with many writers' memoirs,

what she tells us may not be as illuminating as what she leaves out. A memoir is, of course,

after all, an attempt to control the narrative. And what she left out is significant.

It was known to those in her intimate circle that her marriage to Teddy Wharton brought its

challenges, its heartache, and its anger.

But hidden in the leaves of her life was another connection, a deeply passionate, relatively

short love affair, conducted mostly

in the hotels and country inns around Paris that brought her emotions and at times a joy that

she had long abandoned ever feeling. Her connection also brought pain, confusion, and uncertainty,

as the darker side of affairs can certainly do. Her lover was

complicated, overwhelmingly sensually charming, and duplicitous. However, the few years of this affair,

mostly between 1907 and 1910, produced moments of joyous outpouring of work in one of the most

extraordinary poems, passionate

and sensual and deeply personal, that Edith Wharton ever wrote. The wider knowledge of

Edith Wharton's affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton was for many years lost,

and as Edith hoped, never part of the public interpretation of her story.

Relatively recently, in 1980, a cache of over 300 letters long soon destroyed,

and to some, their existence completely unknown, came out on the market. And that finally told the tale.

Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast.

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