Happy birthday, Honoré de Balzac

It is the birthday of French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799), whose multi-volume collection of short stories, The Human Comedy (1815-1848), is renowned for his realistic depiction of life in France after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. His influence on literature is considerable. Among later novelists who considered him an inspiration were Proust, Zola, Dickens, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Henry James. Faulkner, Kerouac. Balzac wrote of life in France after the Revolution, money, power and social success, family relationships including motherhood and fatherhood, women in society and sex. His writing included elements of historical novels, popular novels,  fantasy novels, gothic novels, and metaphysical novels. 

Happy birthday, Henry James

It is the birthday of writer Henry James (1843), who is best remembered as an author of the realism movement in literature. He wrote novels, short stories, and literary criticism. His best known novels are Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Many of his works first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. Though he was an American citizen, he lived in Europe most of his life. He became a British subject in 1915, about a year before he died. James was honored with honorary degrees from Harvard and Oxford universities.

Happy birthday, Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

It is the birthday of writer Edith Wharton (1862), who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 12th novel, The Age of Innocence (1920), in which she questions the values of the Old New York society to which she was born. She was the first woman to receive a Pulitzer. Her earlier novel, The House of Mirth (1905) was a much bolder criticism of upper crust New Yorkers than Innocence, in her opinion. In fact, she considered the later book a sort of apology for the earlier one.

At age 23, she married a Boston aristocrat, Edward Wharton, who was 35. They both loved to travel but had little else in common. For several years, he suffered acute depression and eventually was diagnosed with an incurable mental disorder. They divorced after 28 years of marriage.

Wharton lived at The Mount, an estate she designed and built in Lenox, Massachusetts. She was an avid interior designer and garden designer, and set the standard for tasteful designs of her era. She wrote (with Ogden Codman) The Decoration of Houses (1897) and Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904). At The Mount, she delighted in  entertaining such literary friends as Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Andre Gide. F. Scott Fitzgerald was another matter. Famously, she invited Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda to tea. Zelda refused to come, so Fitzgerald went with a Wharton family friend, Teddy Chanler. Afterward Wharton wrote in her diary: "To tea, Teddy Chanler and Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist — awful."

She traveled in Europe extensively, at first with her husband, until his mental condition no longer permitted it, then with her close friend, novelist Henry James. In Paris in 1906, James introduced her to Morton Fullerton, a foreign correspondent for The Times of London. They began a three-year affair. It was a closely guarded secret, though some people close to her suspected. Fullerton helped Wharton get her novel The House of Mirth (1905) published in French. After the affair ended, Wharton wrote to Fullerton asking him to destroy her letters. She didn't want a scandal. Fullerton kept the letters, though, and they were published in a book The Letters of Edith Wharton (1988).

Wharton also wrote Ethan Frome (1911), The Reef (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer (1917), The Marne (1918), Old New York (1924), The Buccaneers (1938). Her first novel, Fast and Loose, which was finished in 1877, was finally published in 1938. Wharton also wrote poetry, non-fiction articles and books and short stories.

Sir Hugh Walpole was popular in '20s, '30s

Hugh Walpole

It is the birthday of English novelist Sir Hugh Walpole (1884), whose  popular historical romance, Rogue Harries (1930), is set in 1730 in Cumberland, and tells the story of Francis Herries and her family who settle in a family estate there. Subsequent novels in the series, Judith Paris (1931), The Fortress (1932) and Vanessa (1933) bring the story of the family into the 20th century. Walpole believed the novels maintained the traditions and vitality of the English novel, though it explored nothing new. Walpole was a celebrated author in the 1920s and 1930s, and was in demand as a speaker in Britain and America. Early in his career, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, among others, encouraged his work. Virginia Woolf praised his attention to detail in his writing. In his novel, Cakes and Ale (1930), Somerset Maugham depicted him as superficial and ambitious. Kenneth Clark, T.S. Eliot and J.B. Priestly were among literary giants who sponge to Walpole's defense.  Two biographies, Walpole, Sir Hugh Seymour (1884-1941) (2004) and Hugh Walpole (1952), were published after his death.