The great chronicler of the Gilded Age American writer and novelist Edith Wharton had a life that, at times, one could say, mirrored that of some of her characters.

There were moments of joy, sadness, optimism, and some endings that perhaps never found complete resolution.

Biographers started work on the story of Edith Wharton's life, beginning in the late 1960s,

and through the 1970s and into the 80s, newly discovered letters and writings came to light

that revealed a particular relationship that she had had.

A love affair with American journalist Morton Fullerton

conducted in Paris from roughly 1907 to 1910 while she remained married to her husband Teddy.

The affair affected her deeply and transformed her, one could say, as a writer as well as a woman.

I myself became really fascinated with this moment in her life,

and as many of you know, devoted an entire episode recently to telling the story. But this was a

story that Wharton never told herself. But there was another story that Edith Wharton did tell,

and as she got older, she looked back at the years of her childhood and the gilded age

that from that vantage point of the 1920s had long since disappeared.

Her masterpiece, The Age of Innocence, written and published,

and given the Pulitzer Prize for fiction,

appeared just at the beginning of the 1920s.

When Wharton died in 1937, she left an unfinished manuscript of a novel called The Buccaneers, which again was set in those years of the

gilded age and told the story of the young women from New York families who, in an effort to shore up

shaky social positions were packed off to Europe to marry

impoverished, and that term is relative, impoverished aristocrats thereby trading American cash for

European coronets. The first of these women is often considered to be Jenny Jerome, who, in order

to secure her family's position,

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