This event will be re-announced with a new date for fall 2020.

The Mount’s executive director Susan Wissler shares her experience as editor of Edith Wharton in France by the late French scholar Claudine Lesage. Lesage’s study of Wharton is based on previously unknown sources that reveal new insights into her friendships and life abroad.

Edith Wharton in France chronicles Edith Wharton’s dogged efforts to penetrate the Byzantine levels of French high society, her love for the French and Italian countryside, and her consuming passion for the Mediterranean garden. While Lesage is initially skeptical of Wharton’s ability to “become French,” this work ultimately portrays a woman of indomitable spirit who ultimately succeeds in fashioning a French home of her own making in her beloved adopted country.

The author of multiple works of translation, as well original French texts on Wharton and Conrad, Lesage had access to unexamined and untranslated French sources. She presents Wharton’s life from the perspective of a native French woman, capturing a unique view of Wharton trying to navigate through the ancient layers of French society and master its often maddeningly obscure rules, all the while commenting on the horrors of World War I and the cataclysmic changes in the arts and culture of Paris.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall says, “In this smooth English translation, Claudine Lesage’s Edith Wharton in France provides essential reading for lovers of Wharton’s novels. Drawing on new letters for its intimate rendering of Wharton’s circle, Lesage has constructed a kind of epistolary biography that reveals an extraordinary woman seeking and finding independence in an elite social world both familiar and strange.”

Claudine Lesage (1943 – 2013) obtained a Ph.D. in English Literature at Amiens in 1987, specializing in the works of Joseph Conrad. Lesage published several books about Conrad. In 1989, while researching Conrad at the library of the Côte d’Azur town of Hyères, Lesage discovered an unsigned manuscript that appeared to be an early work of Edith Wharton. After studying the manuscript, Lesage determined it was an unpublished account of Wharton’s 1888 Mediterranean cruise aboard the private yacht the Vanadis. After publishing the journal as The Cruise of the Vanadis, Lesage probed further into Wharton’s work and her life, concentrating on the American writer’s French years. Lesage translated several Wharton short stories; edited Lettres a l’ami Francais (2001); and authored Edith Wharton en France (2011). Dr. Lesage died in 2013 before she could publish her final manuscript, a work on Wharton’s life in France intended for an American audience.

Susan Wissler joined The Mount in 2001 as vice president and became executive director in 2008. Ms. Wissler graduated from Brown University, received a J.D. from Columbia University, and, prior to joining The Mount, practiced law in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Highlights of Ms. Wissler’s nineteen years at The Mount include the return of Wharton’s books to the library, the retirement of The Mount’s debt, and editing Edith Wharton in France.

About Edith Wharton and The Mount
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was born into Old New York society with no expectation for her beyond a proper marriage. Wharton broke through these strictures to become one of America’s greatest writers. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her timeless novel The Age of Innocence. Wharton designed and built The Mount in 1902 as a country retreat. Today, The Mount, Edith Wharton’s Home is both a historic house museum and cultural center that celebrates Wharton and her love of the arts. For more information visit EdithWharton.org.

This event is co-sponsored with The Mount.