Edith Wharton
In Our Time: Culture
BBC
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2018
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the works of Wharton (1862-1937) such as The Age of Innocence for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and was the first woman to do so, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. Her novels explore the world of privileged New Yorkers in the Gilded Age of the late C19th, of which she was part, drawing on her own experiences and written from the perspective of the new century, either side of WW1 . Among her themes, she examined the choices available to women and the extent to which they could ever really be free, even if rich.
With
Dame Hermione Lee Biographer, former President of Wolfson College, Oxford
Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds
And
Laura Rattray Reader in North American Literature at the University of Glasgow
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Transcript
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| 0:47.0 | Hello Edith Wharton 1862 to 1937 wrote of High Society in America's |
| 0:52.3 | Guilded Age which for women in her novels was more of a |
| 0:55.2 | gilded cage. Reputation was a woman's fortune. Her way to a financially strong marriage |
| 1:00.3 | and any bluish would lead to her ruin. It was different for the men who could |
| 1:04.0 | braze anything out provided they remained solvent. |
| 1:07.0 | Warden earned a pullet surprise and millions of dollars from novels such as The House of Mirth |
| 1:11.6 | and The Age of Innocence, written in France where she settled |
| 1:14.4 | for the freedom it brought her, as well as a clear perspective on America from across the Atlantic. |
| 1:19.9 | We'd me to discuss the works that the life of Edith Warden are, there Mahmaini Lee, biographer and former |
| 1:24.9 | president of Wolfson College, Oxford, Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature |
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