ABSTRACT
Drawing parallels between a novelist’s life and work is a perilous undertaking. No critic wants to make fatuous, superficial, and sometimes silly statements of similarity. (Undine Spragg has red hair; so did Edith Wharton—thus Undine is merely Edith Wharton’s alter ego.) By the same token, most critics do not want to become enmired in ponderous efforts to discover neurotic symptoms in a piece of carefully crafted artistry. (Edith Wharton was unusually fond of her father and extraordinarily competitive with her mother—thus her novels function principally to rehearse the components of that legacy from childhood, a raging “Electra” complex.) Well aware of such pitfalls, many scholars separate their consideration of a work from any examination of the author’s life, often producing excellent and illuminating commentary.
