The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton

Starting with the tensions in the early family constellation, Gloria C. Erlich traces Edith Wharton’s erotic evolution―from her early repression of sexuality and her celibate marriage to her discovery of passion in a rapturous midlife love affair with the bisexual Morton Fullerton. Analyzing the novelist’s life, letters, and fiction, Erlich reveals several interrelated identity systems―the filial, the sexual, and the creative―that evolved together over the course of Wharton’s lifetime.