Edith Wharton and France at War

One hundred years ago this fall, the men of the 7th Regiment left New York to train for combat before leaving for the trenches of France. Included in their ranks were two members of the Rhinelander family, cousins to Edith Wharton, along with Van Rensaellers, Livingstons, and Roosevelts—a who’s who of young men of New York’s Gilded Age. Wharton thought it the duty of young men to serve in the war and celebrated their sacrifices in her writings. Hermione Lee, Wharton’s most noted biographer, will describe the great American novelist’s feelings for France, the amazing story of her activities on behalf of her adopted country during the First World War, and her complex relationship with America at the time.

Hermione Lee is the President of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, and a biographer, critic, and Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and one of The New York Times 10 best books of 2014). She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has reviewed regularly for The Guardian and for The New York Review of Books. She was Chair of the Judges for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006.