Notes On Publication
French Ways and Their Meaning
Edith Wharton
The Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vermont 1997
Edition copyright 1997 by Edith Wharton Restoration at The Mount and The Countryman Press
PUBLISHERS' NOTE (1997). - The text of this book is a facsimile of the first edition published in 1919.
These pieces were first published in book form in 1919, under the title French Ways and Their Meaning.
INTRODUCTION by Diane de Margerie
If French Ways and Their Meaning enlightens us more on what Edith Wharton came to find in France than it does about the French, it may be due to the fact that within its pages she aligns her personal convictions to her conception of art, and expresses what she herself needed in order to live in a world of her own making.
This astute analysis of a people may, therefore, also be seen as an unintentional autobiography, one in which Wharton justifies her reasons for deciding to move to France. ln it she informs us that everyone in France has " the seeing eye, the hearing ear." She - a lover of wit and anecdote who came from a family immersed in silence and secrecy, where words remained unspoken -must have found it both reassuring and appealing ta partake in the free, ironic conversation at which the French are so adept.
The French woman seems perfect to her, and that thought is perhaps at the heart of the book. Wharton projected onto the French wornan all the possibilities of which she herself felt capable: independence, courage, intellectual equality with men, and privileged masculine friendship. She, who admired George Sand and Madame de Sévigné, and who was - while living in France - the close friend of some of the greatest wits of the day, had suffered in silence for years among her own set in her own country. The culminating idea of Edith Wharton's study of the French is that in France love merges with " the poetry of life," instead of being divided between body and soul as it is in a puritanical society. For a woman so conscious of separation, exile, and duality of being, nothing moved her more than the thought of this possible unity.
It is in this book that one gathers through Edith Wharton' s visions and comments how much these pages are autobiographical; how - through her French experience - she was released to become herself. What she found in France was the freedom to utilize that which she already possessed: a profound insight that she was able to transmit into her novels, the majority of which she wrote while living here; and for that, we, the French, will always be grateful and proud.
Paris, October 1996
Translated by Judy Boullet